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From: pereira@research.att.com (Fernando Pereira)
Subject: Re: practical language?
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References: <4v546a$9j9@ftp.ee.vill.edu> <4v7ctt$5ae@agate.berkeley.edu> <edward-2308960015180001@server.magicmouse.com>
Date: Sat, 24 Aug 1996 21:16:40 GMT
Lines: 33

In article <edward-2308960015180001@server.magicmouse.com>,
edward@magicmouse.com (Edward de Jong) wrote:
> The academic
> community despised COBOL, and would rather publish papers in ALGOL, an
> artificial language, than in a language people actually used on a daily
> basis.
Algol artificial??? Many people in the 60s and early 70s were using Algol
for real applications, including me. Its direct extension Simula-67 was
the first strongly-typed object-oriented language, and again it was quite
heavily used in the same period. The ideas in both languages central in
the development of more recent procedural, block-structured,
strongly-typed programming languages, including Pascal and descendants, C,
C++, Java, and many others. Both are in some respects improvements on most
of their successors (to paraphrase a famous quote about Algol-60).
> Starting today, I
> would teach Java, because it is commercially extremly important, and will
> give them better Job-hunting possibilities.
The doctrine that college programming courses should focus on the most
fashionable languages and systems is truly pernicious. If you give someone
just one tool, they will starve when the usefulness of that tool is gone.
Where are the RPG-II programming jobs of yesteryear? An honest computer
science education gives students the *intellectual* tools to understand
and create new computer languages and systems, not just fluency in the
flavor of the year. What is important about programming languages are the
computational abstractions they embody, not details that become outdated
in a few years. Of course students need to be able to program in real
languages to write real programs and get jobs. But anyone that understands
the underlying abstractions and how they are created and combined can
learn any new language in a short time. The demand by parents and students
to have "relevant" courses is based on deep misconceptions about
computing. The goal of an academic education should be precisely to
overcome such misconceptions, not perpetuate them in the minds of students
that would soon become casualties of their mental shackles.
