From a one-liner in awk for processing lists to a one-pager in Python (and the same assignment n Perl, for the fun of it), to a device driver in C. Why not?

Can you actually back this up in any way.. I mostly see this behaviour with ppl that learned a language outside of school in their childhood. Go to school where they start learning a new language reject it because they start out to basic etc.

I can confidently say that I learned a language or two before college, and came out knowing more about most languages than a majority of my fellow classmates.

People who learn it there first year at school are much more open minded and start mapping languages based on concepts and not how well or easy it does compared to the language they already know.

And, can you actually back that up in anyway? You’re pretty much calling people who take initiative to learn something they’re interested in closed minded, that’s quite the leap.

Wasting time tracking down a memmory leak? Good. Better to spend time in college learning these things than in a work environment.

c/c++ being low level and closer to the actual machine code is a huge boon in learning what is actuall happening with each line of code. Some will argue that you don’t need to know this, and high level languages are the future. I would highly disagree. Weather the job you will have in the future will care about memmory is not the issue. When these issues are in you head you take them into account unconsiously and write better code.

I’m tired of everyone trying to make programming in college “easier” so more people can learn it. I think the problem are the teachers, not the language.

I would rather be put through the trenches in college when I can afford to fail multiple times and learn then get fired because I couldn’t figure something out. The students are the losers here unfortunetely. In the end I’m glad I know c/c++ and chose to follow it in school.

It’s taught me flexibility and learning languages like python and java come with relative ease. The hardest part is learning all the libaries that are included with both languages.

“When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But let’s be honest, not everything is a nail. Students who only utilize classrooms as a source of programming knowledge are only taught to use a hammer thus don’t see the opportunity to write a Python script to periodically scrape”

Can you actually back this up in any way.. I mostly see this behaviour with ppl that learned a language outside of school in their childhood. Go to school where they start learning a new language reject it because they start out to basic etc.

People who learn it there first year at school are much more open minded and start mapping languages based on concepts and not how well or easy it does compared to the language they already know.

Programming languages are tools

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But let’s be honest, not everything is a nail. Students who only utilize classrooms as a source of programming knowledge are only taught to use a hammer thus don’t see the opportunity to write a Python script to periodically scrape starcraft2.com/faq.xml for a release date (god dammit Blizzard); read that again, it was a run-on (but hey, I’m CS not English).

As a consequence, hammer-equipped students are essentially classically-conditioned (yay psychology) that programming solves a certain type of problem and get stuck that way. By exposing students early to different tools, they learn to see solutions to building skyscrapers, tree houses, modern architecture, and fixing faucet leaks.

That said, given that most college students are more likely to have the need for a small convenience script, or a blogging engine, or a web application they should at least be taught to use Python, Ruby or PHP. And for some obligatory evidence, it was Mark Zuckerberg (controversy aside) who wrote some PHP codez to form Facebook and these two cool cats named Sergey Brin and Larry Page who used Python (and Java) when starting this small company named Google, you may have heard of it. Yes, at some point they started using more Java and C++ and there are plenty of examples where Java was used from the start, but the point is that Java is not the only tool, and other languages should be taught so students can solve a greater variety of problems.

Sorry for the overused analogy, it just fit so damn well for what I wanted to say.

What is your job?

I don’t care what your job is actually, but I know what professors at research universities’ jobs are: research. An significant chunk of universities are research universities, including the university of this blog’s author. As a consequence, few professor are concerned with students’ needs and what would help the best for when they graduate.

I’ll leave it at that, if you want more about how research universities as a whole are flawed as an education system, Google it (which btw probably hits platforms written in many languages, not just Java).