Laura's List - was Re: new years resolutions

[Christopher A. Craig]

Laura Creighton <lac at strakt.com> writes:

> I would dearly like it we could separate the people who want and
> need advanced vocational training, from the people who want to become
> academics, from the people who are only having their entrance into
> the workforce delayed for some number of years.  
> 

This is an interesting comment because I am on the other side of the
issue, but feel the same way.  At the university from which I
graduated there were two major factions in the computing department:
those who thought the job of the department was to fill an immediate
need in industry, and those who felt the job of the department was to
educate students on the underlying premises and theories of computing.

The first group would make arguments like "Why is the object oriented
programming class taught in SmallTalk?  Nobody uses SmallTalk, why
don't you teach it in Java?"  The second would make arguments like
"SmallTalk is one of the most pure OO languages available, Java is not
nearly as good for teaching OOD."

I, along with most of the professors, was in the second group.  It
sounds like you are in the first.  For what it's worth, our professors
had no problem with informing people of trade schools in our area
where they could learn to program in Java or C++ or whatever, they
just refused to orient their curricula around current language trends.

-- 
Christopher A. Craig <com-nospam at ccraig.org>
"Software hoarding is not a victimless crime." Richard Stallman