Damian Conway writes: > I have no confidence yet, however, that Perl 6 will be widely taken up > as a CS teaching language. ... the decision on a teaching language > usually reflects either the personal biases of the individual teacher, > or those of the curriculum committee, or else mirrors the market > demand of the local community. How else do we explain the awful > languages that are so often taught in our universities. :-(
A university I'm familiar with taught introductory programming in the 90s using Pascal, chosen for its pedagogical merits, then taught OO using C++. But students, and potential students, were put off by the idea of learning Pascal, seen as an irrelevant language. So in the late 90s they switched to teaching C++ as a first language. Shortly afterwards they found would-be applicants on open days were querying why they were teaching C++ when rival universities offered Java, seen as what they needed to learn for getting jobs. So a few years later, they switched to Java. In other words, the language chosen for teaching introductory programming was determined by the views and misconceptions of 16-year-olds! However, the staff teaching that module didn't feel that Java was a good choice as an introductory language, so they asked the higher-ups to be able to put some Python in there too, as an example of a different programming language. This was agreed, so long as the course was still marketed as teaching Java, and just happened to include some Python along the way. (This was over 10 years ago, when Python wasn't as widespread or recognized as it is now.) I think that over time the amount of Python increased. So maybe the situation isn't completely without hope. Smylers -- Why drug companies shouldn't be allowed to hide research results that they don't like: http://gu.com/p/3zat8 — UK gov wasted millions on Tamiflu Sign the AllTrials petition: http://www.alltrials.net/
