> On Mon, February 12, 2007 8:46 pm, Matt Emmerton wrote: > > My alma mater (University of Waterloo) went one step further -- instead of > > standardizing on Java (which has some potential to become an "open" > > language allowing folks to dig into gcj and related projects) decided > > to have all of their engineering students learn C#. > > In 1998 (bubble years, remember), while I was in graduate school, one of > the faculty proposed taking the required basic C/C++ classes required for > every Information Technology student and instead requiring Visual Basic. > His defense of the idea was "Well, we have companies asking for that! > It's in demand!" It didn't happen.
Luckily for me, the Math/Computer Science faculty resisted the urge to move to "commodity" languages for many years and continued to instruct using Pascal and Modula-3. I still recall the beauty of Modula-3's object model and cringe when I'm forced to use C++. They only recently (2001-ish) switched to Java, which was a reasonable decision. In the case of the engineering faculty, their move to C# was "helped along" due to a $1M donation from Microsoft. For shame! -- Matt Emmerton
