[prog] Sample implementations of UNIX utilities.

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Sat, Dec 28, 2002 at 02:44:42PM -0500, Terri Oda wrote:
> > My alma mater has gone to an entirely Java-based curriculum.  C/C++ are
> > never used.  There's one class which uses Scheme, but other than that
> > it's all-Java, all the time.
> 
> That's unfortunate.  I think it's pretty important that students be exposed
> to a bunch of different languages, since it gives them some basic insight
> into the "best tool for the job" way more professional programmers work. 
> (Not that all of them learn it, from the horror stories I've heard... but at
> least the school's trying.)
> 
> But... have you heard of other universities going the route of yours?
>  
> I ask because I suspect your alma mater may be the exception, not the rule.
> I know lots of universities are heading the Java route (it seems like the
> ones in this province all switched to Java for first year classes in 1998 or
> so), but I don't know of any others who've abandoned teaching other
> languages so much.  Even after the java switch here, students are taught C
> or C++ and assembly in their first two years, followed by others dependant
> upon the specific course, be it scheme, lisp, perl, smalltalk, etc.  It's
> fairly similar at the other universities where I know students or recently
> ex-students.

Hmmm, very interesting.
Me, I don't know what my Alma Mater is teaching now.  But what they
teach may depend on what kind of pressure they're under -- whether
they're supposed to teach people Computer *Science*, or whether they're
supposed to prepare them for a Computer Science *career*.  I know here in
Australia the universities have been under pressure for quite a while
from the government to be places that "get people jobs", as the
government itself has been under pressure to "get people jobs".

If a Comp. Sci. course is career-oriented, then they may fall under the
same illusion and mistake that Managers-looking-for-programmers do:
considering that knowing the latest-and-greatest language is what is
needed, rather than learning how to learn languages by being exposed to
lots of different ones.  I mean, once you've learned a bunch of
different proceedural, functional, database and object-oriented languages,
then you have the model for that *style* of language in your mind,
and learning a new one in a given class is more a matter of syntax than
semantics.  Teach them about the classic algorithms, and again they'll
be more able to consider the "right tool for the job" than naievely
applying the only methods they know to every problem.

Alas, let me tell you a horror story.  The project I'm working on at
work is mature software, that was originally written by AT&T, passed
through a few other hands before we were given the task of maintaining
and expanding it.  It is a bletcherous combination of Fortran, C, C++,
shell scripts, awk and Perl.  We are trying to migrate more of the code
to C++, but the horror part of it is that the existing C++ was
written, not to take advantage of the niceness of C++, but it looks as
if it was written by Fortran programmers.  The variable names are all
crypticly 8 letters long.  There are global variables everywhere, that
one cannot tell that they are global variables -- no naming conventions.
And for some unfathomable reason, a number of the C++ classes have all
their data put into static members -- now there's nothing wrong with
static members for things that need to be truly global, but these things
didn't -- and as a result, the program is a lot less flexible than we need
it to be.

Anyway, the point of this rant is, that things can get very ugly if one
treats all programming languages alike.  A program may do great and
powerful things (and this one does) but Good Style is vital for Those
Who Come After.  It's no good saying "Use The Source, Luke" if the
source is... obscure.

And, no, I've never been a great fan of the obfustcated C contest...

Kathryn Andersen
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