Re: ObjC/Cocoa in university curricula?
Re: ObjC/Cocoa in university curricula?
- Subject: Re: ObjC/Cocoa in university curricula?
- From: Chris Hanson <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 20:30:18 -0500
At 6:30 PM -0400 8/17/02, Michael Mulligan wrote:
I wish they did Obj C/Cocoa at my school...but instead, Microsoft has
already gotten hold of my school (Cornell) :-(. I am not certain of the
details, but I believe that there are plans to have a MANDATORY C# course
for all CS majors.
[snip]
I wish Apple would pursue academia as vigorously. *sigh*
I'm glad they don't.
This kind of blatant propagandizing in a CS degree program really
damages the value of that program. I look down on CS programs that
have courses that specifically teach particular languages languages.
Having a required course specifically teach a proprietary language
like C# specifically because the creator of that language made some
donations is even worse. The value of a degree from Waterloo -- and
if what you say is true, Cornell University -- is now lowered by
quite a bit.
Working towards a computer science degree (or, even better for people
who want to get into software development rather than academia, an
undergraduate software engineering degree) should be about learning
how to build robust software and how to solve problems. At Carnegie
Mellon, for instance, learning languages was a side effect of classes
you took. Taking Programming Languages taught you Standard ML as a
side effect of teaching programming language theory. Taking AI
courses taught you Common Lisp. Taking data structures courses
taught you C++ and Common Lisp (and later Standard ML).
The only course in the CMU CS curriculum that I remember that was
even close to a language specific course was 15-127, "Introduction to
Computer Programming", the first-semester CS course for all the
people who had never programmed before. It was in Pascal for quite a
while, then they switched to C, and now I think it's taught in Java.
But even in 15-127, it's all about the theory (functions, fundamental
control structures, etc.) and practice (decomposing problems,
debugging) instead of the syntax of a particular language. The
syntax is the easy stuff, you can mostly skim a reference manual and
pick it up as you go along.
(I suggest we take the discussion offline -- at least if anyone has
replies to this post. This is probably getting a little off-topic
for Cocoa-Dev.)
-- Chris
-- just my personal opinions
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