That's sad and bloody infuriating.

But then again what good is reason & logic against fashion
and trend in this greedy world we live in.

This is true. I once went shopping with a Java programmer, he insisted
a new snowboard (despite the fact the one he had still seemed to slip
well).

Well the shopkeeper was rather frustrated that he could not sell him a
specific board that was obviously technically superior, you see
"Java-Man" was insistent on having a board that looked good when held
vertically in the ski lift queue - and to be honest it was probably
sufficient for his boarding abilities.

Its unfortunate in this world that trends are usually driven by
"Java-Man" but then again entropy is increasing isnt it.

Well of course the shopkeeper was a die hard engineer, but at the end
of the day he too would will have to change his stock to suit the
fashion of the season or go without feeding his family.

The truth about Java is obvious, but what's more, people want jobs when
leaving college, and more often these days it seems that one must have
n years coding experience in a given flavour to be marketable, rather
than be a good solid adaptable engineer, and in order to get thru the
thicket of agencies who havent got a clue about what they are peddling.
Agents are not qualified to guage how much of an engineer a candidate
is - however they can count years of experience on their fingers and
they can run a search engine through a resume database - thats about
all they can do.

I think a solution would be to teach those students of yours the
benefits of using Java at the thin client end, and of using serious
ada95 at the back end, teach them CORBA and how to plug it all together
- teach them systems thinking.


Dave C-M.






--- [log in to unmask] wrote:
> We have recently come under pressure to change our initial teaching
> language for CS1 from Ada 95 to Java. Apparently this is the sexy
> thing to do inspite of the poor/obscure C-like syntax, lack of a
> language standard, poor compiler error messages,.....
>
> The plan appears to be to use an OO approach in Java from the start
> although the Java textbooks which claim to use this approach seem to
> me to place far too high a demand on the students.
>
> I would be grateful for pointers to any arguments and information
> that
> might be useful in resisting such a change.  Any Java horror stories
> would be particularly welcome.
>
> Also if anyone has taught CS1 using Ada with an OO aproach from the
> start, I would be interested in hearing of their experiences.
>
>    Dr. Alan Barnes
>    Computer Science
>    Aston University
>    Aston Triangle
>    Birmingham B4 7ET
>    U. K.
>
>    Telephone: +44 121 359 3611 Ext. 4663
>    E-Mail:  [log in to unmask]  (JANET)
>    Fax:     +44 121 333 6215
>

=====
DSCM Homepage : http://consultancy.gotoinfo.ch/dscm/

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