On 2015-05-11, Skip Montanaro <skip.montan...@gmail.com> wrote: > Don't CS departments still have a computer languages survey class? When I > was a graduate student at Iowa in the early 80s, we had one. (It was, as I > recall, an upper level undergrad course. I didn't get into CS until > graduate school, so went back to filled in some missing stuff.) I don't > recall all the languages we touched on, but ISTR there were five or six. I > know we hit Lisp (today, it would likely be Scheme), and probably APL > (today it would probably be Python+Pandas, MATLAB, R, or something similar).
There was a similar class at both Iowa State and University of MN. You learned a half-dozen languages in a single quarter. IIRC, at ISU we did Lisp, Prolog, APL, Snobol and a couple others. The main pedagogical language at the time was Pascal, but we also learned FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, and a couple three assembly languages (PDP-11, VAX, Z80, 6502). If you were a computer enineering major instead of computer science, you also leared a hardware description language. At the time it was AHPL. More recent gruaduates only seem to know one language (Java or C++) and are completely baffled by anything else. And don't get me started on that damned noise they call music... -- Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! ! Now I understand at advanced MICROBIOLOGY and gmail.com th' new TAX REFORM laws!! -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list