Java at schools considered dangerous

Joel Spolsky caused quite a stir (as he likes so much doing) with his article about schools that use Java mostly/exclusively in their curricula. At TheServerSide it created one of the longest threads I've seen there: Joel was called everything from a modern day dinosaur to right on the mark. A lot of paranoia and hate messaging, as one could expect from a Java only site, but several posters maintained that O-O is just one of the programming paradigms (albeit the most popular one right now) and in that sense Java (or C# or VB.NET) should be used only in part of the curriculum, generous space was claimed for functional programming (Scheme was mentioned a lot, but personally I like Haskell better) and also for C++ (more for the pointers and low-level programming than for the O-O aspects of it). Down here in Ecuador, most schools have adopted C++ as the main programming language and a migration to Java was getting momentum when .NET hit the market, after ignoring C# for a couple of years, academia is starting to adopt it with good, although very few, results so far. How is it in your region?

1 Comment

  • Every time my professors say that we can use any language I use C# and blow the socks off all the other students projects. After doing this for 3 years one of my professor quietly asked me a few C# related questions and told me that he was considering integrating it into a few projects next year.

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