HM>> Last time that I heard, in Ben-Gurion university, the first programming
HM>> language was Java. That's a swell idea in my opinion. Java is
HM>> feature-complete, you can't argue with that. It also means that students

I can. Too many times I have heard from Java guys working next door
phrases like "This feature works starting with Java 1.x" and saw "This
feature is deprecated".
Also, Java is not exactly the most effective language (try doing integer
array sorting on C and proper Java) and also it's interfaces with other
languages are pretty arcane, especially for the beginner.

HM>> hackers, I think it is extremely important to teach beginners to
HM>> think object-oriented, even if all they'll ever use is an

I don't know why OO is the single concept that needs to be taught before
all. Imagine the guy is going to be a relational DBA - how OO is going to
help him there? OO is an important concept, but it is not the only concept
in existance.

HM>> The basic stuff you need to teach people is algorithms and data
HM>> structures.  You want to save them from all the clutter around

Hear, hear! And C is actually _better_ for teaching data structures,
because you can _feel_ how these data structures work. In Java, a lot of
things are masked by "gc is going to make it for me" and "I don't need to
know how hashes are working - I have standard class for that" and "I
don't need to initialize - it will be null anyways". That's good sometimes
for work - but for teaching, that's not always good. The same way as they
make you to solve problems even though the answers are in the book - to
make you not only know to use it, but know to understand it.
-- 
[EMAIL PROTECTED]       \/  There shall be counsels taken
Stanislav Malyshev      /\  Stronger than Morgul-spells
phone +972-50-624945    /\              JRRT LotR.
whois:!SM8333


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