begin quoting Todd Walton as of Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 09:51:01AM -0800: > On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 08:25:10 -0800, Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > begin quoting Todd Walton as of Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 07:37:06AM -0800: > > > "Most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically > > > Java vocational training." - Alan Kay > > > > People keep quoting that like it's interesting or something. > > Which it is. Interesting, that is. Well, maybe not so much > "interesting" as "insightful". It's not so insightful as to be > brought up twice, once by Tracy, and then this, but I brought it up > anyway, because I was responding to Tracy.
/shrug It's not like it's even that insightful, except if you missed the dot-com boom as it affected computer science departments. There is *immense* pressure, from students, and from corporations, to churn out programmers "skilled" in $language_of_the_year. (And then the corporations want to hire entry-level programmers and expect senior-level skills from them...) A sizable fraction of the students going for a CS degree (at least during the dot-com boom) resented learning "alternative" languages -- they wanted C++, dammit (later changed to Java), and none of this strange Lispish crap, or god help us Prolog! Useless! How does this help us get a job?!?! When the $language_of_the_year classes are filled to overflowing and the only way to get the students to learn other languages is to make the classes that teach 'em *required*, the CS departments will offer more classes in what's desired, if for no other reason to reduce level of complaints from the students who "can't get in" to those classes. Of course, _that_ is a problem with students -- they go to a university, and then moan about all those "electives", and essentially do as much as possible to obtain a "vocational" knowledge of a limited subject. (I figure that SDSU screwed up when it dropped the Finite Automata class from the required-for-graduation set. I think the logic was that it ended up as a "weeder class" as the final hurdle, which didn't help anything, as weeder classes need to weed out the unsuitable students *early*.) > > "CS degrees aren't meant to certify that you can program" > > Which is the point of the quote. I don't know what the point of that quote is, other than to be quotable. Where's the problem? Java? No, Java's a fine language, depsite the FUD spread by some in the Open-Source community (and ignoring the hype from Sun) and in Redmond. It does what it's supposed to do just fine, and it isn't the fault of the language when it's misapplied. The universities? No, they can only buck the trend of what students and employers want a _little_ bit. They can try to resist fads, but attempts to do so for very long bring them under extreme criticism. "Outdated" is a favorite term if they're not pushing the critic's favorite "technology". Vocational skills? No, those are fine, there is nothing wrong with vocational schools, and besides, that's what businesses *say* they want. I think Tracy hit it on the head -- a big problem is that employers want programmers with entry-level pay and senior-level skills to implement safe ways to do dangerous and stupid things. In other words, they want the impossible done for cheap. -Stewart "Just don't ask me to solve NP-Hard problems in O(1)" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
