On Wednesday, 9 March 2016 at 19:45:40 UTC, cym13 wrote:
Let's add that D binaries are usually too bloated for their disassembly to be as readable as their C equivalent (mangling doesn't help) so even for "reverse engineering" assembly it is less than perfect (although perfectly doable of course).
Yes, I think there are many good reasons for sticking to languages like C, Java or a narrow toy language. You usually want to use the language used in the best books for the course... And you care most about catering for the students that are having problems with the topic, i.e. make it easy to self study for weak students.
A new rich language can easily distract from learning objectives. I once tried to push some key XML technologies by having a mandatory pipeline that was like this: SQL -> XQuery -> XML -> XSLT -> HTML, which worked out ok, except it became too time consuming for the non-geek students. Which made them frustrated. It becomes challenging for students if they have to struggle with learning both the topic (design) and the tools at the same time.
So, either make learning the language the objective, or stick to a language they know or use a clean language they don't know, but that is perfect for the course. *shrug*
