On Wednesday, 9 March 2016 at 16:12:08 UTC, Michael wrote:
On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 08:40:17 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 07:38:01 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
Motivated by Dmitry's "Pitching D to a gang of Gophers"
thread, how about pitching it to a gang of professors and
graduate students?
The geeky graduate students are the better target.
In teaching you usually want a focused clean language related
to the course or a language that is already adopted by
industry.
This hold a lot of weight speaking as a current postgraduate. I
find that when teaching undergraduate courses, you're very much
restricted to a few things. First, the choice of language to
teach at the beginning of a student's degree needs to be based
on what they will continue to use throughout their degree and
beyond graduating. This means that other modules with specific
software/library requirements will need to be taken into
account (no point in teaching D/Go/Rust when you require MATLAB
for several modules or coursework is required to be submitted
in C/Java in later years). So it needs to fit with other taught
units and that means that other members of staff who do not
know D (and honestly, often don't have the time to learn a new
language and rewrite all of the course material) will be stuck
teaching the students another language on top of achieving
their unit's aims.
Second, a university needs to be able to provide sufficient
argument for teaching a language in relation to graduate
employment; If the job market demands C++/Java/Python and only
know D then problems arise pretty quickly and heads of
department are not going to approve languages in place of those
with high industrial demand. For most graduates, experience and
skills for graduate employment is key.
Postgraduates, on the other hand, often have more time to
experiment, and due to the nature of postgraduate work
(particularly Ph.D and beyond) their research tends to require
novelty. D has proved very valuable for me during my research
and the lack of library requirements for experiments to be
written and tested means that I am not tied to using a
particular language. I am of course not saying that we
shouldn't try to encourage undergraduates to explore D, but
it's very difficult to try and introduce a new language into
the curriculum at most universities without a rather large
volume of support and justifications for doing so. Just some
thoughts.
Chuck Allison's experience is quite interesting. I don't think
Utah Valley University is seen as a top tier school, but enough
of his students have received very good offers from top companies
is enough to make one think.
http://dconf.org/2014/talks/allison.html
Of course, teaching staff at most places won't have the standing
that Chuck Allison does to break with custom, but on the other
hand I suppose if you stick with custom you will at best achieve
customary results.
I do take your point about postgrads, and that's a fair
observation too.
