<div dir="ltr"><div>I'm sure that all has to do with the perception (perhaps valid) that knowing C is an essential job skill. But remember that these are first year students: I wouldn't have expected them to have developed a sense that learning a language like Scheme can be valuable for its own sake. Well, that's not quite true: it is disappointing that at the end of the course they are still focused what they can put on their resumes.</div> <div> </div> <div>What bothers me is that professional developers focus so much on tools and languages without really thinking critically about the problems they are trying to solve. I work on message based interfaces between healthcare applications (mostly on the Java side), and it's awfully difficult to get people to think in terms of, say, the contract a service provider needs to support.<br> <br></div> <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 8:28 AM, Grant Rettke <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:grettke@acm.org">grettke@acm.org</a>></span> wrote:<br> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"> <div class="Ih2E3d">> See the thread "peasant revolt against Scheme: in the archives of the PLT scheme discussion list)<br><br></div><a href="http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/mailarch/plt-scheme-2001/msg00066.html" target="_blank">http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/mailarch/plt-scheme-2001/msg00066.html</a><br> <div> <div></div> <div class="Wj3C7c">_________________________________________________<br> For list-related administrative tasks:<br> <a href="http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme" target="_blank">http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme</a><br> </div></div></blockquote></div><br></div>