It's easy to point to Java and C as stalwart success stories in hindsight, but I can recall with Java there was a tremendous amount of histrionics from the C++ and VB crowd claiming that Java was merely another passing fad. C faced down Pascal and COBOL, two languages which were considered far more favorable to programmers at the time.
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I feel sorry for CS/CEng departments these days, as they're facing pressure from both sides: The industry wants more vocational-style training, and students want "real world" experience but also want a world-class western liberal arts education. It's as if their idea of a perfect school is one with the prestige of Harvard married with the curriculum of DeVry. I'm afraid you cannot have both.
I can't imagine a better course than writing a Lisp interpreter in C, and then a Java implementation in Lisp.
They're clearly not fads, they're clearly useful, and the kind of knowledge and education that doing such an exercise would require is exactly something that proponents "world-class western liberal arts education" would laud.
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I feel sorry for CS/CEng departments these days, as they're facing pressure from both sides: The industry wants more vocational-style training, and students want "real world" experience but also want a world-class western liberal arts education. It's as if their idea of a perfect school is one with the prestige of Harvard married with the curriculum of DeVry. I'm afraid you cannot have both.