Re: Where does the new generation of programmers begin?

When I started university (1999) I was already familiar with Javascript and several BASIC varieties (including QBASIC and VisualBASIC).

At university in our first year, first term we were taught Haskell. In the second term we moved on to an OO/procedural language which you won't have heard of. In third term, we had a course which covered all of C, C++ and Java - as you can imagine, not in much detail.

What happened after that depended very much on what modules you chose. Prolog was the standard language for AI courses; SQL was used in database courses; etc. For projects you were generally allowed to choose whichever language you liked - I usually used Haskell or Perl.

Looking at the current syllabus it appears that Java has pushed out Object-Oriented Turing. I'm glad to see that the Programming I course is still firmly focussed on Haskell.

use Moops; class Cow :rw { has name => (default => 'Ermintrude') }; say Cow->new->name

Comment on Re: Where does the new generation of programmers begin?

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Re^2: Where does the new generation of programmers begin? by davido (Cardinal) on Oct 08, 2013 at 15:22 UTC
That sounds like a pretty solid program! Haskell as a first course? Cool. Dave	[reply]
Re^2: Where does the new generation of programmers begin? by aaron_baugher (Curate) on Oct 08, 2013 at 17:14 UTC
During my short stint in college -- the first semester of an engineering program -- the main language being taught was Fortran, and the machine being used was a Vax mainframe. After dropping out and getting a Commodore 128, I learned a little BASIC and more 8502 and Z80 assembly programming, and later some C. A few years later, the first Internet provider opened for business in the area, and they had a Unix system (SunOS, I think) that you could shell into as part of your account. So I started learning shell/awk/sed (still logging in with a terminal program on my C128), and that led pretty quickly to Perl. I think it worked out for the best. I might have learned some useful programming theory and algorithms and such had I stayed in college, but the language and OS were already on their way out. On my own, I stumbled into languages and systems that I'm still using today, so very little learning has been wasted since then (except a few days I once spent learning ActionScript because I was thinking of writing a Flash game). I did learn Java when it was the Next Big Thing, which I try to stay away from now, but I still consider that useful since it taught me that OOP isn't the answer to everything. Aaron B. Available for small or large Perl jobs; see my home node.	[reply]