Re: Is MCSD worth doing?

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From: UAError (null_at_null.null)
Date: 01/22/05 

Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 18:52:16 -0500

The Poster Formerly Known as Kline Sphere <.@> wrote:

>>Agreed, but you are always going to get a contingent of
>>students that had improper, inadequate or no exposure to
>>programming - and you don't want to hit them over with OO
>>and programming simultaneously in the first semester. I
>>suspect thats one of the reasons MIT uses Scheme during the
>>first year. And C is definitely NOT a first language despite
>>its lack of OO. Now the second langauge in the curriculum
>>should be OO.
>
>I don't think that should be an issue. As you know C is simple,
>following a simple syntax which is only made powerful by the standard
>(and 3rd party) libraries.

Many so-called "programmers" start fish-tailing when faced
with pointers, pointers to pointers and type casts.

>The problem solving capabilities are no
>different in C than in other procedural programming languages; and
>dynamic memory allocation/deallocation should not be seen as some
>stabling block!

C++ evangelists kept preaching the RAII idiom - but thats
lost on the GC language world. There are other resources
that can leak and have time sensitive de-allocation. And
with RAII and stack allocated objects you can erase
sensitive information automatically after you are finished
with it. In Java and C# you have to do that manually.

>
>Also, it's harder for people to unlearn something and re-learn the
>same thing in a different way. This can be seen with Cobol vets with
>20+ years who cannot (or maybe will not) look at implementation in any
>other way than with a procedural approach.
>
People usually prefer the way they learn first - however
applications have grown more complex, and the old methods
can't cope.

Your anti-procedural language argument probably played into
MIT's decision to use a functional langauge first (though
back then they where primarly interested in generating a
larger graduate student pool for their AI programs).

However there might be a catch. I have no hard data on this
but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if some
introductory Java and C# courses are being taught in a way
you would teach a procedural langauge, at least in the
beginning, "to make it easier on the students" ("to make it
easier on the procedurally trained instructors" would be
more like it).

>
>Kline Sphere (Chalk) MCNGP #3

'The real crux of the "software crisis" is that software IS hard.'
Robert C. Martin,
'Designing Object-Oriented C++ Applications Using the Booch Method', p. ix

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