Do you guys really think PHP should be in computer science curriculum? In my curriculum (in canada) I learned C/C++, Software Design (database architecture and OO Design), SQL, Unix and Networks (OSI, TCP-IP and HTTP mainly)
There was no Perl, Python, PHP, ASP, JSP and even no VB... I think it's more important to learn Programming than it is to learn PHP. I know for a fact that some of our teachers knew about PHP, but still they decide to teach the class in C. And I happy they did. Now if your school has no PHP server, why don't you suggest and offer to install it? That's what we did, we made it run on a small machine on Linux first than with the help of the university sys admin, we installed it on a Unix server. The sys admin is now very happy to do his web stuff in PHP instead of Perl :) just my canadien 2 cents... (1.14 cent US ;) ) py At 03:46 AM 1/18/2002 -0200, you wrote: >Hello, > >Francesco Gallarotti wrote: > > > > I am a student in a college in NY state. Here we have several servers and > > dozens of courses on computer science. No server is PHP ready and no course > > instructor knows anything about PHP. Why do you think this is happening? I > > really like PHP and I am using it in my personal website to work with some > > text files and a small database. Why PHP is so not popular in the computer > > science teaching area? > >IMHO, that is there no marketing effort behind PHP, meaning there is no >Microsoft nor Sun nor any strong brand behind PHP to advertise it. > >Even in the Open Source world the PHP credit is relative. For instance >well known publishers on the field like O'Reilly don't seem to care much >about publishing PHP books. I don't know why. > >O'Reilly seems to give more credit to Perl and Python than to PHP, but >it is also true that such languages have well organized advocacy groups >while there seems to be no organized advocacy for PHP at all. > >Also PHP is only known to be adequate for Web programming niche market >although it can be used as a general purpose programming language. Since >Computer Science courses are for much more than Web programming, >colleges do not see PHP as a good bet for the future of their students. > >Unfortunately, in this world when somebody does not know about >something, what is important is not what that "is" but what "seems to >be". So humans seem to give more credit to something that appears often >in many places than something that appears not very much in only one >place. PHP popularity seems to be limited to what it is advertised for >which isn't much as I mentioned above. > >So, if you care about PHP credit and consequent success in the Computer >Science world, what shall you do about it? > >Well, as an individual you may not be able to do much. But I think there >is plenty of things that can be done to better market PHP so it gets the >necessary recognition to appear in Computer Science curriculum. > >In the past I made several suggestions to PHP developers in order to >improve PHP recognition not only in colleges but also in companies that >are not aware of the capabilities of PHP. If companies are not made >aware of PHP capabilities, that reduces the chances of employment of >people like everybody here that would like to keep working on PHP and >you may be forced by the circumstances to work with other more accepted >languages in the labour market. > >Unfortunately, my suggestions were not considered seriously, meaning >either people present then either not agree with the suugestions or >simply nothing seems to have been done in that direction. > >I don't want to bring back the discussion of the merits of the >suggestions, but rather to remind them for people that were not present >or not paying attention to consider them and maybe who knows does >something about it. So what I suggested was something more os less like >this: > >- Promote contests of PHP applications or components. The Python >community does this and it seems to be getting the attention of the >computing media. This leads to an obvious greater exposure of the >language to the computing community that does not know it while it >promotes the development of more and better applications and components. > >- Promote a banner exchange/Web ring between all sites that promote PHP >related materials: articles, components, applications, etc.. This would >give a greater sense of the wide support that users that adhere to PHP >may find. Somebody objected because it would be hard to tell which sites >provide a reasonable level of quality. I think this could be sorted by >providing a way for users to vote on each of the sites. The results of >the votes would be shown in the banners to advise about their quality. > >- Seek deals with offline and online computing specialized media to >assure that PHP gets exposure in the exchange for banner advertisement. >People that are not aware of PHP often learn from those media. PHP >exposure could be a space for letting qualified writers write articles >that would let readers of those media be aware of PHP capabilities >especially for the people that are not aware of PHP credits because >those are the most important people that PHP marketing should target >because you may find many decision makers among them. Decision makers >often decide whether tecnologies should or not be used in companies or >included in college curriculum. > >I have more ideias but this is just to illustrate how PHP can be >marketed without necessarily spending money on the efforts. Of course my >ideias are not the only ones that would work and not necessarily the >best. Anybody can bring more ideias but what is really important is that >something gets done. > >I am crossposting this to php-dev because I think that the most >important people that can do something about this are there. If you >don't agree that this topic makes sense in that list, just don't >follow-up in there. > >Regards, >Manuel Lemos > >-- >PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) >To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
