> > It appears to me that many/most college computer science departments > > teach Java as the first language - sometimes as effectively the only > That's moderately sensible, and arguably better than the Fortran I > started on.
Only moderately, though. It's disappointing that when a lot of the youngsters have to take the strongly typed training wheels of Java off, it's really hard for them to do it. I think that's one of the major defects of the ACM CS1 and CS2 recommended curriculums -- it's possible to be mono-lingual and still be compliant, and the kids don't get to see examples of the major types of languages and where they are most effective. Functional and data-driven languages have good reasons to exist, and there are problems that really are appropriate for them, and not procedural languages. > > language. Perhaps that's why C is in 2nd place. > > Note that Pascal is coming up fast! It moved from 22nd place to 15th > > place in a year. > If one accepts Delphi as being largely an implementation of Pascal, it's > even better. I guess I have too many scars from DEC-10 Pascal and VS Pascal as used in VM TCPIP to think that ANY Pascal is a good idea...8-) It's encouraging to see both Perl and REXX in the top 50. REXX seems to finally be coming into it's own on non-IBM platforms. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
