[plt-scheme] Re: More pedagogic stuff

From: Matthias Felleisen (matthias at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 11 12:11:47 EDT 2008

1. Don't confuse elite research universities with institutions that  
use "University" in their name only because someone decided everyone  
should get a degree from a college/university. My hunch is that to  
this day, 90% of these places claim to teach OO early and first.  
(Reality: At least they use an OO language to teach Fortran.)

2. Last week, I had a private exchange with a person close to core  
PLT. The email basically said that during a consulting presentation  
with a major industrial software producer, one of the attendees got  
up and said "it is way to expensive to use object in (this) area of  
business. We use records and functions." I wouldn't be surprised if  
this is true and becomes more true so as companies that create  
networked software discover the cost of moving back and forth  
(serialize and unserialize).

-- Matthias






On Aug 11, 2008, at 1:57 AM, Benjamin L.Russell wrote:

> On Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:31:17 +0900, Benjamin L.Russell
> <DekuDekuplex at Yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> While I was at college, we never covered object-oriented  
>> languages. We
>> covered Scheme for Introduction to Computer Science as well as Data
>> Structures & Programming Techniques, Haskell for functional
>> programming, and C for Introduction to Systems Programming, but never
>> any object-oriented language.
>
> I forgot to mention that this was back in 1990-1994, before Java came
> along.  Nevertheless, even now, it is ML, not Java, that has replaced
> Scheme in Introduction to Computer Science, so the trend seems to be
> more toward functional programming in a first course, rather than
> object-oriented programming.
>
> -- Benjamin L. Russell
>
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