I watched the evolution of the teaching of programming
languages at Ateneo from 1982 to the present -- that is,
PL for incoming CS freshmen.  Here is the chronology:

Apple Pascal
Turbo Pascal on CP/M
Turbo Pascal on MSDOS
C on MSDOS/Win + C on Unix
Java on Windows
Java on Linux

We started teaching Java to freshmen more than five years
ago, even before Java became fashionable.  This was through
the insistence of Arnie del Rosario, Dr. John Paul Vergara, and
Dr. Luis Sarmenta (of Vir-X fame).  I voted for continuing with
C under Unix, but I lost to the Java vote.  This year, the
young faculty have started to teach Java under Linux.

There seems to be some differences between Java on Windows and
Java on Unix/Linux.  These differences became obvious to me
when a graduate student of mine working on graphical analysis
of paper chromatography images kept getting errors/warnings
when Java code that passed javac for Windows was recompiled
using javac for Linux.  He got frustrated and decided to junk
Windows and work under Linux instead.

If you ask me, I would have written the thing in C under X
and it would have run faster.  But his Java version, although
slower, runs under most platforms!

PMana


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