This might be only tangentially relevant: I sometimes wonder a little when "industrial relevance" comes up as an argument for or against a teaching language ... is "industrial relevance" desired for the sake of maintaining the students' interest, or for preparing them for the "real world" (by which people normally mean the commercial world)?
If it's the latter, then an argument can be made for almost any language's "industrial relevance". Here I'm going to do the terrible thing of using myself as an example: The commercial products I worked on for ADC (a large multinational telco supplier) involved Java, Perl, EPM (a proprietary language), SXP (another proprietary language!), Delphi (Borland's extension of Object Pascal), C, C++, Javascript and SQL. I learned precisely one of those at university (object pascal), although I used C in a number of university projects too (without ever being taught the language). Even a new greenfield web project may involve all of Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, SQL, and perhaps Flash. So to an extent, I agree with Ruven Brooks' assertion that the ability to learn new languages is more important than a knowledge of particular ones that are deemed "industrially relevant". However, it seems to me [pure opinion here] that the part of the issue lies with recruitment -- for a programmer, picking up a new language is often really quite easy; but HR departments tend to look for "X years Java experience" on a CV, and recruitment agencies have been known to make an initial sort of CVs simply by searching for the number of occurrances of the technology they want (without reading the CVs at all at that stage). While "industrial relevance" of teaching languages arguably might not be a factor in a student's skills, is it a factor in the student's future employment prospects? On the purist academic side, Computer Science / Computer Systems Engineering degrees are not simply vocational courses, so that should not be a strong consideration. On the empathy-with-student-applying-for-jobs side, I can see how a student would find it very useful to have some popular technologies to put on their CV. On the practical side, this then presents questions of how the market changes with supply and demand in new technologies -- eg, in Brisbane, it seemed [again, no empirical data, though] a lot easier to find work in C or Delphi than Java, not because there was less demand for Java, but because there were so many Java programmers around. Of course, here I've been straying well away from the question of Java's empirical usefulness for teaching particular computer science concepts! cheers, Will Billingsley (former Senior Developer for ADC 1998-2002) - Automatic footer for [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] unsubscribe discuss To join the announcements list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe announce To receive a help file, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] help This list is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/ If you have any problems or questions, please mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
