Re: Obj-C/Cocoa in education
Re: Obj-C/Cocoa in education
- Subject: Re: Obj-C/Cocoa in education
- From: "Michael P. Rogers" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 19:14:31 -0600
I just bought that very book; it is terrific, and I badly envy the
students at your school.
Wait, you should talk to my students first :-)
Any advice for promoting Cocoa as a suitable subject area for CS?
1. I'd play up the fact that Objective-C presents a different
perspective on objects, and has concepts of model-view-controller
wired into the frameworks themselves.
2. There is something to be said for making students think about
garbage collection.
3. Cocoa is more compact (by an order of magnitude) than the Java
Class Library, so there's at least the *hope* of mastering more of it.
4. Show people PB/IB in action.
5. In CS departments, where the Mac OS rarely gets much attention,
emphasize the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X, too. Linux, as you
know, as huge mind-share at universities.
6. Keep encouraging authors to write textbooks. CS professors know
that they need to keep up with the latest-and-greatest, but a
thousand technologies from a thousand companies are vying for their
attention. Anything that can flatten the learning curve for the
professors will increase the likelihood that they'll be interested
enough to pursue a subject.
7. Cocoa evangelists need to show up at CS conferences, like SIGCSE
(or even SIGGRAPH).
I'd say more, but I need to try and master the NSDocument
architecture before class tomorrow :-0
Michael
--
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Dr. Michael Rogers
e-mail: email@hidden
Phone: 217-424-6327
For information about Computer Science at Millikin University, visit
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