"Chris Calloway" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > teach languages. Teaching languages is frowned upon in some computer > science departments under the logic that if you belong in a computer > science class, you'd better show up for class already knowing > something > as easy to grasp as an implementation language.
I don't like CS courses to focus on a language either, but neither do I think we should expect students to already know one. But learning a computer language should be a trivial exercise once you understand the CS concepts of algorithms and data and I/O etc. One of the worst things I find as an employer is the number of CS grads I get to interview who insist they only know one language. I wonder what they learned at college. That's like an electronics engineer saying he only knows how to solder, or a civil engineer who only knows how to lay bricks! A CS course should concentrate on principles and theory and learning languages should be a practical detail that the student does almost by osmosis. And this is, of course, why my tutorial teaches three languages not just python ;-) -- Alan Gauld Author of the Learn to Program web site http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor