Author: Omid David Tabibi
Date: 09:46:27 07/31/03
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On July 31, 2003 at 04:17:47, Graham Laight wrote: >On July 30, 2003 at 00:00:54, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>Depends on your ultimate goal. If you are going to be a programmer, it is >>not the best way to go. If you program in Java for 4 years, then leave and >>go to work where they use C, you have a _long_ learning curve. You've never >>seen pointers, for example. >> >>We took a _lot_ of heat about that from companies like BellSouth. > >It sounds to me as though Java is better than C, because it prevents errors with >type. > >For most businesses, the most pressing requirement is to make good code >cost-effectively - not to make super-fast code expensively. C is clearly going >to take longer to write and debug if it doesn't force type compatibility. When you learn C++ (which includes C in itself), you can very easily learn Java later. But it doesn't work the other way round: when you get comfortable with Java, you simply won't grasp the bizarre way the pointers work... In many programs Java would be a better choice than C/C++, but a programmer should always have the skill to write optimized code when needed. Recently there was some initiative to replace C++ with Python as the main programming language in our CS department. That initiative was fortunately blocked, now we just have to block Java from taking over :) If it was up to me, I would have replaced all those Prolog/Scheme/etc courses with more C/C++/Assembly stuff! Why the hell should the students learn Prolog these days?! > >Imagine you were a medical professor. You teach your students to treat illness >with medicine. The local doctors complain, saying that the standard methodology >in your area is to treat illness with leaches. Would you change your curriculum? > >It seems to me that this is analogous to what you have done with your >programming curriculum. > >-g
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