Having course experience in Pascal (well, I do) is completely worthless to industry. No one cares about Pascal. It's a horribly broken language for doing anything interesting beyond simulating ATM machines. Do you list Pascal on your resume? I don't.
I do list Pascal on my resume. And that was considere a plus when I interviewed for my current job. While I won't need to use Pascal on a daily basis, we do have quite a code base written in Pascal. If you are a company that still makes money from software that was written in the mid 70's, you do care about people knowing Pascal and FORTRAN.
I do agree that colleges should *not* act as technical schools, but to ignore the major applications of the areas being taught, by say, exclusively using Pascal in all courses, is absolutely stupid.

My AI class, for instance, used Lisp -- not Pascal. Pascal here would be stupid. As for learning the language, yes, this was on us, but we were given pointers. AI in Pascal is a round peg and a square hole.
What's your frustration with Pascal? I do hope that you didn't get the impression that I said academic students should only program in Pascal. Far from that. Ideally, during their academic career, they get the chance to program in one or more ALGOL like languages (Pascal, C, and even Perl and Java fit that bill), object-oriented languages (Simula, Java, ...), functional languages (Lisp, Haskell, ML, ...), UNIX "scripting" languages (shell, AWK, Perl, ...), assembler, SQL, Prolog, etc. Or at least, a decent selection of them as there is limited time.

But learning a (computer) language isn't very academic. It's just craft.

I've turned in assignments in a dozen or so different languages when I was a student. But I never followed a course that was dedicated to a language. We learned Pascal as part of the "Introduction to Programming" course (and not after 6 weeks had past), and we got some shell (including AWK) during another introduction course. In later years, we got courses about programming language classes, but that wasn't about a specific language. If you needed a specific language, you got a copy of a reference guide. If you were lucky.

Abigail

In reply to Re: Academic Formation by Abigail-II
in thread Teaching Perl inside an Academic Course by Mago

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