Re: Google is Hiring [ now way OT ]

["Matt Emmerton" <matt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Mon, February 12, 2007 8:46 pm, Matt Emmerton wrote:
> > My alma mater (University of Waterloo) went one step further -- instead
of
> > standardizing on Java (which has some potential to become an "open"
> > language allowing folks to dig into gcj and related projects) decided
> > to have all of their engineering students learn C#.
>
> In 1998 (bubble years, remember), while I was in graduate school, one of
> the faculty proposed taking the required basic C/C++ classes required for
> every Information Technology student and instead requiring Visual Basic.
> His defense of the idea was "Well, we have companies asking for that!
> It's in demand!"  It didn't happen.

Luckily for me, the Math/Computer Science faculty resisted the urge to move
to "commodity" languages for many years and continued to instruct using
Pascal and Modula-3.  I still recall the beauty of Modula-3's object model
and cringe when I'm forced to use C++.   They only recently (2001-ish)
switched to Java, which was a reasonable decision.

In the case of the engineering faculty, their move to C# was "helped along"
due to a $1M donation from Microsoft.  For shame!

--
Matt Emmerton