[chrisfosterelli]

I know formal education often gets a lot of criticism around HN, but I think the approach the article is talking about is heavily mirrored in most university computer science curriculums.

Universities tend to focus on paradigms and patterns, and typically force a student to learn at least 3 languages throughout their education (much more if they want to). Just in my undergrad I learned C, C++, C#, Objective C, Swift, assembler, Java, Go, Javascript, Python, and Haskell. My personal experience is that university grads are much better at adapting to new languages than someone with 4 years experience in only a single language.

That's of course not to say you can't do the exact same sort of education without going to school (and probably in less time).

[closeparen]

Yes! My university CS program focused on teaching you to think about computation, with the particular language you'd express your thoughts in as an interchangeable detail.

Scheme for beginners, Python for web scraping and data munging, C for concurrent network and systems programming, and some small exposure to Java, Haskell, Standard ML, awk, yacc/lex, C++, and your mobile environment of choice depending on which classes you took.

Many were upset by this "very theoretical" approach, as they'd prefer to have immediately employable skills in JS-framework-of-the-week. Instead they were taught how to think independently of a particular language, and to get comfortable with learning new ones.

From a programming craft perspective, it was a little disappointing that we were never focused on advanced language features or idiomatic code, but I felt I had a solid enough base to self-teach that sort of thing.

[ams6110]

Same with my degree program. Learning the programming language used for any particular class was an "exercise left to the student."

After I finished my undergrad degree I had an "exit interview" and I mentioned that this was one of the things I liked about the curriculum, because it helped me see that the abstract computing theory is what is important, and languages are largely a matter of syntax and convenience. The professor's response was that they so often hear the opposite, that students complain that they don't learn languages that employers want.

[morgante]

I agree that's what they aim for, but in my experience far too many CS grads (especially from non-top universities) have absolutely no understanding of the core paradigms. Instead, they've basically memorized "this is how I make a linked list in Java." Ask them to do the same exact task in another language and they're totally stumped.

[kochthesecond]

My experience is the opposite, that those with formal education have a much higher chance of having grasped the concepts, over the language libraries.

[morgante]

You might have only worked with students from top CS programs.

[nextos]

The perfect example of this approach is Concepts, Models, and Techniques of Computer Programming. It covers a wide range of paradigms [1] using Oz/Mozart and it also shows examples using many famous languages.

[1] https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/VanRoyChapter.pdf

[sambe]

Agree so much. I had a very theoretical course and am often shocked at how reluctant my peers are to investigate a problem in a language they don't already know (normally just one or max two).

Also, if they need to quickly munge some text they'll have a dozen Java classes and several poms.

I think this has real practical consequences for decision making (not knowing alternatives etc).

[dargueta]

Also agree. My programming languages course had me writing code in Racket, Julia, Erlang, Prolog, and Haskell, in addition to the languages that all students had to use for certain classes (C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, Assembly, and C#)

[no_wizard]

This reminds me of something my CS professor/mentor told me once.

'Teach how to program C, you will give them a job. Teach someone how to LISP, and they will keep learning forever'

We learned a lot of LISP and Functional based programming from this guy. I mean a lot. Fun times I do miss!

[sbuttgereit]

> Universities tend to focus on paradigms and patterns... > ...That's of course not to say you can't do the exact same sort of education without going to school...

I think the personal motivation that someone brings has a lot to do with how they fare short term and long term in this regard. Yes, a good University program will teach you the concepts and underlying theory expressed by language implementations; coming out of such a program you will absolutely have the jump on someone that jumped into JavaScript programming informally. You will adapt more quickly to other technologies faster, too, as you have the essentials to make that shift whereas the JS guy may not.

Having said that, if you attended and graduated college because it was something that you were "suppose to do" or because it would get you a good job and computer science was just a way to a good job after college (with no particular interest in the field otherwise)... over time the more personally interested developer that learned JS informally will likely catch up with you and overtake you.

My formal education is in music composition. However, I was programming assembly on the old 8bit machines when I was a kid. 20 years on as a technology professional, I devote large amounts of time to learning concepts and theory that aren't strictly necessary for me to program something that works well enough for my customers. I learn these things because I'm genuinely interested in the underpinnings of what I do and because I want to perfect my professional skills... not for an employer, but for my own edification: I care about what I produce because it's me producing it. There are many of my friends that did get formal education in computer science and I've surpassed them in both quality of output and overall understanding. (BTW... don't get me wrong, I have colleagues that have formal education in computer science AND the same sort of professional dedication I have... a good number of them far exceed my knowledge and understanding and I very much look up to them. Still, I'm glad I don't have to feel ashamed standing by their side professionally either).

[chrisfosterelli]

I think that's great, and I agree completely. I added that last sentence because I think at the end of the day your education is what you make of it, regardless of whether you went to school for it or not.

[gravypod]

I think the top-10 universities do it right and the rest don't. (This is a bit of an exaggeration but you most likely know what I mean).

Most of my classmates don't usually "learn" a language. They do an assignment by copying, hammering at the computer, or just asking for help. The basis of how university is set up is antithetical to the learning and exploration of new programming languages. This is based on one simple thing that most universities do and is very easy to fix.

   Don't mandate a programming language for you assignments

If this one thing was done, we'd probably instantly see a much higher failure rate and a much hire quality of turnout. If early on in the curriculum students got a tour of every one of the big name languages and got to just choose the best tool for the job for the rest of their time at university there'd be a much closer approximation to how things (at least for me) work.

If one of your projects is something like "scrape a webpage for X data" you wouldn't want to write that in a bash script (which I've been made to do [0]) I'd want to do that in Python with BS4. Or if your project is to write a parallel dot product function you wouldn't want to write that in C (which I've been made to do [1]). I'd want to write that in Julia.

Even in my class that I took for exploring programming languages we were forced to use C++. We were writing an interpreter using C++ which I'd rather have done in some Lisp-like languages.

Unfortunatly I've not been able to make the design decition to play with other language (in school) to see how they will better impact the development of these applications. I've not had to prototype stuff to see what language it will work best in (in school). These are decitions made for me.

I've found that this isn't how things work, at least for me, and I'm the one who is told "Do X" and I pick a way to do it. Whether it's by setting up a spreadsheet it a macro in it that generates the data or writing some real code. I get to choose the most elegant solution and I suffer the consequences then I didn't choose the most elegant solution since I have to my software when it breaks 2 years down the line.

[0] - https://web.njit.edu/~sohna/cs288/hw3.html [1] - https://web.njit.edu/~sohna/cs288/hw10.html

[CJefferson]

There are three problems with "Don't mandate a programming language" -- I'm a lecturer and I've done it for advanced practicals in later years.

* Students expect to be able to get help when they have problems. There is a good chance no member of staff knows Julia / Moonscript / ...

* Some languages make tasks trivial -- while this is nice when you are in the real world, if I want to test student's ability to create something I don't want some students missing most of the work. How do I then mark it?

* Similarly, if the question was "implement a malloc-like memory manager", well you really have to do that in C,C++,Objective-C, maybe Rust, but it makes less sense in python.

Also, getting a "quick tour" of (say) C++ isn't really useful, students who try to pick it up by just googling are likely to write terrible code. Learning a language properly takes work.

[gravypod]

> Students expect to be able to get help when they have problems. There is a good chance no member of staff knows Julia / Moonscript / ...

For this I have two answers. Past the first year people shouldn't be getting help with "my code won't compile". They should be able to develop the skills needed to search that on google and find SOF links.

The second answer is a question: Why don't members of staff know "Julia / Moonscript / ..." and if they don't why can't they logically reason about what's going on in the language without having used it? I don't know Go but when people have asked me to look at some Go code to see there is a bug I can still reason about what's happening. Isn't that what this article is about? All languages are just mix-matches of common idioms with new ways of expressing them. If the best of the best, those who are teaching the future generations of computer scientists, can't do this it would seems strange to me.

> Some languages make tasks trivial -- while this is nice when you are in the real world, if I want to test student's ability to create something I don't want some students missing most of the work. How do I then mark it?

If the student understands how to use the abstraction then they have likely learned something far more valuable. If you're assigning labs that consist of basic idioms that can be whisked away by common library functions then you might consider changing your curriculum to focus more on solving problems rather then codifying solutions.

> Similarly, if the question was "implement a malloc-like memory manager", well you really have to do that in C,C++,Objective-C, maybe Rust, but it makes less sense in python.

I see no reason why you'd have to write that in C/C++/Objective-C/Rust. If you're going after the idea of writing a working memory manager, and not write me a kernel that has a memory manager, then Python would work great for it. Here is an example:

   class Allocation: 
           def __init__(self, start, size):
                   self.start = start 
                   self.size = size
   
           @property
           def end():
                   return self.start + self.size + 1

   class FirstFit:
           def __init__(self, total_memory):
                   self.allocations = []
                   self.total_memory = total_memory
   
           def alloc(self, size):
                   if not self.allocations:
                           allocation = Allocation(0, size)
                   else:
                           allocation = None 
                           for i in range(len(self.allocations)):
                                   current = self.allocations[i]  
   
                                   if i + 1 < len(self.allocations):
                                           # Check to see if we can fit inbetween this current allocation and the next
                                           if not self.allocations[i + 1] - current.end >= size:
                                                   continue
                                   else:
                                           # Check to see if we can fit inbetween this end allocation and the end of memory
                                           if not self.total_memory - current.end >= size:
                                                   continue 

                                   # We can so allocate
                                   allocation = Allocation(current.end, size)

                           if not allocation: # We can't so return NULL
                                   return None

                   self.allocations.push(allocation) # Store this allocation in our memory allocation table 
                   return allocation[0]
           def free(self, start): 
                   for i in self.allocations:
                           if self.allocations[i].start == start: # Find out pointer
                                   self.allocations = self.allocations[:i] + self.allocations[i + 1:] # Slice it out
                                   return True # We made it!
                   return False # We couldn't find this! PANIC!

This is crappy code but it can be done very eligently and I think this gets across the theory better then doing this in C. In this you can also experiment is far more complex datastructures easily. (What if I think of memroy as a Tree and divide the value of my node by 2 every time it's size is too big?)

> Also, getting a "quick tour" of (say) C++ isn't really useful, students who try to pick it up by just googling are likely to write terrible code. Learning a language properly takes work.

I'd say that's just because of the poor design of modern C++. You can do a quick tour of python and easily get basics, of C and easily get the basiscs, of Java and get the basics, of Common Lisp and get the basics. You don't need to master a language to see where it is applicable.

[CJefferson]

> Why don't members of staff know "Julia / Moonscript / ..." and if they don't why can't they logically reason about what's going on in the language without having used it?

If the bug is a shallow/algorithmic bug, that's reasonable. Recently I was helping someone debug some javascript code. Eventually, we found the problem was that, in javascript, that [11] < [2]. I'm not particularly knowledgeable on javascript, so I didn't know it did < comparison of arrays by string comparison. That's the kind of thing that really needs.

> If the student understands how to use the abstraction then they have likely learned something far more valuable. If you're assigning labs that consist of basic idioms that can be whisked away by common library functions then you might consider changing your curriculum to focus more on solving problems rather then codifying solutions.

This I just have to disagree with. I think it's valuable for students to learn how to implement quick sort. It's useful to learn how to implement big-integer arithmetic. It's useful to learn how you can "fake" Java-style inheritance with structs and function pointers, so you really understand what's going on under the hood.

Of course long term, you wouldn't typically implement these things yourself, but understanding the fundamentals is important.

Also, if I set a practical which involves (for example) connecting to a HTTP server, intending them to do the raw connection themselves, and they use a 3 line python program, using the standard library, have they really learnt anything at all?

There certainly is a place for giving students more freedom, particularly in later years. It's clear the modern world is moving into "slap together 50 javascript/python packages with string" type programs (and that's because it's a great way to be productive quickly), which universities don't currently teach that well. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!

[gravypod]

> This I just have to disagree with. I think it's valuable for students to learn how to implement quick sort.

I'd rather the students kow how to implement large software architectures, keep line counts down, abstract problems correctly, and learn how things are done in the real world.

> It's useful to learn how to implement big-integer arithmetic

Not in my opinion. Maybe, maybe, show them how emulating FP math works but writing big-integer arithmatic functions is pretty useless for most people and is far too strait forward to require them to develop their skills of development software architectures.

> It's useful to learn how you can "fake" Java-style inheritance with structs and function pointers

You can't force them to learn patterns, you can only give them work that is better suited to using the patterns provided. You can even hint to your students "Hey you can make a get_car and get_bike and make a Drivable struct that has a Drivable->stear() and stear can be a function pointer!" Forcing them to use a pattern isn't useful.

> so you really understand what's going on under the hood

Using function pointers isn't really correct for how Java stores class/object information. This is kind of only used in virtual functions IIRC. When I've decompiled static bytecode you see stuff like LString(some function).

> Also, if I set a practical which involves (for example) connecting to a HTTP server, intending them to do the raw connection themselves, and they use a 3 line python program, using the standard library, have they really learnt anything at all?

You're assigning the wrong problem. Don't say "Make and HTTP request" say "implement an HTTP header parser". The problem is now language and abstraction agnostic and involves a much more complex problem who's complexity lays in the realm of the software organization. The HTTP Parser code can be used to read and write requests and the next lab can be to use your new library in a larger project. I think that is far more useful.

> There certainly is a place for giving students more freedom, particularly in later years. It's clear the modern world is moving into "slap together 50 javascript/python packages with string" type programs (and that's because it's a great way to be productive quickly), which universities don't currently teach that well. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!

There is a measurable reason for this and it's not because of productivity. It's about maintainableilty, consistency, and bug erradication. I'd love for you to read this paper Do Code Clones Matter? [0] to see what they have found.

Making it so people know how to:

   * List all the featurs that a library will need
   * Take those features and write them in a clean API
   * Do it in the most clean language-specific way (ex Pythonic code) 
   * Distribution methodologies
   * Maintainablilty and support of these libraries
   * Using these, and others, libraries in larger applications
   * Documentation & Technical writing

I'd really love it if you could email me and follow up after you read that paper and tell me what you think. My school username is jk369 and my school's email server is @njit.edu. (I've split this up to avoid spam)

[0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.05472.pdf

[CJefferson]

I will look at your paper, but I think it depends what your target is, for students.

Many of our students go on to do PhDs. For that an understanding of deep algorithmics is much more important than being able to use and distribute a library, or building larger applications. They need, in their field of student, to be able to reimplement and understand many important difficult algorithms, not (for example) put together some node.js libraries.

However, there is a place for that kind of degree. Someone once said to me something which stuck with me: "You wouldn't try to merge a maths, and accounting degree, just because they both contain numbers", yet that's still what we do in computer science.

[userbinator]

Don't mandate a programming language for you assignments

I'd do them all in highly optimised x86 Asm, just because I can. ;-)

Not all students start at the same level; making the choice of language a free-for-all is just going to stretch that disparity even more. The ones at the top will naturally find ways to entertain themselves more, and the ones at the bottom will have no less idea of how to do things than copy-pasting code they found somewhere else (if the language doesn't matter, it makes that even easier...)

We were writing an interpreter using C++ which I'd rather have done in some Lisp-like languages.

On the other hand, I believe that doing something in an "unconventional" language for it is one way of improving your skills since you have to then apply true creativity and knowledge instead of just following an existing solution. Using a language which makes the task easy or even trivial doesn't really benefit the learning process.

[gravypod]

> I'd do them all in highly optimised x86 Asm, just because I can. ;-)

I'd love to see someone do this because I'd say it'll be harder to do assignments I'd give out in x86 assembly then probably i686 or even ARM.

Most people would likely do everything in the language they want to learn or will need in industry. If you're just messing around then write it all in some obscure architecture like AP-101 or PDP-8 or even 4004. Maybe I just love the classics.

> Not all students start at the same level; making the choice of language a free-for-all is just going to stretch that disparity even more

That's why I said they should first be introduced to languages. That should be the first thing, day one, and continue until they get a basic idea of all the common features in programming languages.

> On the other hand, I believe that doing something in an "unconventional" language for it is one way of improving your skills since you have to then apply true creativity and knowledge instead of just following an existing solution

It may be fun but I wouldn't want to do it in production or on my grade.

[jghn]

That was me when I was in college. At the time my school was in the mid-teens for CS rankings although it is worse now. While I was there I worked heavily with C but also worked with C++, Java, List, MIPS RISC assembly, ML, Prolog, Ada, Fortran, Perl, Eiffel and a few others. For all of the languages that were supposed to be showing me a different paradigm in retrospect I didn't learn what I was supposed to.

Years later when I had both enough experience to appreciate these things as well as interest in programming languages I did start to grok all of this but it certainly wasn't due to my education.

[no_wizard]

To be fair, and I don't have your context on this, but looking at your link of the assignment for [0] it appears to me that this is more of an exercise in getting people comfortable with more advanced bash features, specifically looks like it relies fairly heavy on regex? I agree that BS4 is a better tool for this job, certainly, but there is perhaps a point in what is going on here too.

As far as the second one goes, I bet that has more to do with the professors particular familiarity with C than it does an understanding of what the best tool of the job for that is. I'll cede that point :)

[FLUX-YOU]

>My personal experience is that university grads are much better at adapting to new languages than someone with 4 years experience in only a single language.

These benefits seem dubious to me in the long term unless you plan to work on compilers and languages which is certainly a noble goal and is very much a hot area right now. Picking up brainfuck in a short period of time is not really noteworthy IMO. I am also struggling to come up with a way to present this to other people without coming off as an annoying know-it-all. Do we want to value the ability to sprint or the ability to finish a marathon?

Plus, your memory will deteriorate over time without constant practice. Am I really going to commit time to reviewing all languages I choose to learn every year or so? The article seems like a challenge-to-take more than career advice.

If someone doesn't immediately want to work with languages, I would rather teach them what might be analogous to the lay of the land in our industry:

- What tools do you use to make a desktop application on Windows/Linux/Mac?

- How do the different browsers (Edge/Chrome/Firefox) implement HTML/CSS/JS? Can you make a consistent behaving application for all of them? And why should you run far, far away from any company asking you to support IE8 in 2017?

- How would you make a cross-platform library for Windows/Linux/Mac?

- How would you make a mobile application?

- What are the most popular IDE options available?

- What are the different database options available?

The difference in opinion is exactly teaching more engineering vs. teaching more science, but also learning about the ecosystem that drives language choice and development. This knowledge contributes as much to "knowing the right tool to solve the problem" ability as diverse language knowledge.

[chrisfosterelli]

> Do we want to value the ability to sprint or the ability to finish a marathon?

We want to value the ability to finish the marathon, which is exactly why it's important to be able to adapt faster. The industry is constantly moving, and someone who can learn new languages and technologies easier/faster is at a huge advantage.

For a concrete example, take Objective-C and Swift. Apple has made it pretty clear that's were things are going, and a developer who has C#, Haskell, Objective-C, Python, Rust, and Ruby experience is going to make that transition much better than a developer with just Objective-C experience. This same thing even applies to frameworks within the same language (think React/Redux and functional programming experience).

> Am I really going to commit time to reviewing all languages I choose to learn every year or so?

Definitely not! You focus on the concepts in the language and don't worry about memorizing anything. Quite a few years ago I learned Go for fun. I basically ignored it after that, but when I needed it for a project recently it came back very quick.

Those other questions you pointed out are, of course, very important. I think you learn the answer to those as you learn languages as well.

[general_ai]

I just wish those universities actually produced programmers who understand the low level mechanics of how computers work. I.e. Why your program runs 100x slower if you're not careful about cache misses, pretty basic stuff like that. Moore's law is over, it's time to start caring about performance again.

[dahart]

What makes you think universities produce people who don't care about performance and aren't educated about low level mechanics? That's an honest question, I'm not challenging your experience. I don't know what your experience is, of course.

In my experience, people with CS degrees do understand the low level mechanics statistically more often, on average, than people who don't have a formal education, or people who go to 2 year colleges or trade schools. There are definitely people who make it through a degree without thinking much about cache misses, but in my life I've seen far more programmers without an education fail to understand caching than programmers with an education.

I've never met anyone, educated or not, that doesn't care about performance at all. I do meet people that prioritize what they care about, and choose to weigh performance of the programmer over performance of the computer, choose to prefer working with valuable abstractions over milking every cycle out of the machine.

It depends on what you're doing. Usually, thinking about CPU cache misses in a web development environment is premature optimization and a massive waste of effort. Not always, but usually there are other more important performance considerations.

[general_ai]

> What makes you think

Personal experience. I've been trying to hire moderately competent, junior software engineers would be able to write and optimize C++ without much supervision. They're now more rare than the Sasquatch. Today, "caring about performance" means picking a language that's only 5x slower than C, rather than 100x slower. Hardly anyone even knows why alignment might be desirable, or how long it takes to fetch memory after a cache miss, or how concurrency primitives actually work. For my generation, "caring about performance" means that C compiler generates suboptimal assembly, and you handcode it because you know better and need that extra oomph.

> It depends on what you're doing

It sure does. You don't have to worry about the lower level stuff every day. We deal with extremely high performance code, and even _we_ don't think about it every day. But it definitely pays to know what's going on. Otherwise it's not software engineering, it's cargo cult science and rain dancing, prone to fall apart at the first sign of difficulty. It's like having a certified car mechanic who doesn't know how to open the hood. You can have a few of those to change tires and broken tail lights on the cheap, but you also need the dudes/dudettes who know what to do when "check engine" light comes on.

[tybit]

Optimizing C++ code is enough of a niche requirement nowadays that it is totally reasonable for you have to train junior devs in this area rather than hiring them ready to go.

If you don't want to train them, pay the price for an experienced C++ developer instead.

[matwood]

> junior software engineers would be able to write and optimize C++ without much supervision

"Junior" and "optimize c++" just do not typically go together. Even more so if you're talking about deep optimizations like cache hit misses, and not just algorithm decisions or breaking down problems properly.

[general_ai]

Ok, "optimize" might be an overstatement in this case. More like "write code that's not totally oblivious to how compiler will compile it, and how CPU will execute it". A reasonable request for a software professional with a degree, one would hope.

[WildUtah]

"Junior" and "optimize c++" just do not typically go together.

They sure did in the early 1990s. That was the only way you could ship a working product.

[keldaris]

As an anecdotal counterpoint, I'd love to see more people hiring for positions like that. Most C++ jobs are between "we know you're clueless, but hopefully you'll learn" (rare) and "you know this stuff, how are you not in a senior/architect position?". Hacking away on moderately complex performance-conscious code without necessarily spending too much time on architect-level concerns sounds lovely.

[dahart]

> Personal experience. I've been trying to hire moderately competent, junior software engineers would be able to write and optimize C++ without much supervision. They're now more rare than the Sasquatch.

Are you certain they're rare? As opposed to not responding to your hiring ads, for whatever reason?

I do think the percentage of programmers who care about CPU cycles has gone down; I would totally agree with that. Decades ago it used to be that you had to care, it wasn't an option. Today, for most work, it's simply no longer a requirement to worry about cycles. BUT, I've hired lots of kids in recent years who knew plenty about compilers and assembly and caching, so I have a general feeling that they're out there. I would speculate that a lot of the kids who can deal with C++ and performance issues are interested in games...

> ...it definitely pays to know what's going on. Otherwise it's not software engineering, it's cargo cult science and rain dancing, prone to fall apart at the first sign of difficulty. It's like having a certified car mechanic who doesn't know how to open the hood.

It does pay to know what's going on, I totally agree. In some sense literally, as the deeper you go, the more "expert" and "high paid" you will expect the technician to be.

Your analogy to car mechanics is apt in the sense that what you're talking about has already happened in both the auto industry and the tech industry due to increasing complexity of the systems over time -- the first line or two of support people don't fix the internals for you and often don't know how (yet they do "fix" most problems). Even the higher paid expert technicians at car dealers can't fix a huge portion of the problems anymore because the problems are software. Same goes for very smart and very capable QA engineers - they know how to test systems, they know how to find which system is broken, they know how to reproduce issues, but the system may still be a black box. And the engineers writing your core app code still can't generally fix issues in their libraries or operating systems. And so on. So, I personally wouldn't go so far as to say it's cargo cult science or lacking software engineering, we just have more layers than we used to. We can and do engineer at one layer on top of other layers that are black boxes, almost nobody can claim otherwise. But, as you pointed out, you do need people staffing those multiple layers.

[general_ai]

> As opposed to not responding to your hiring ads

Could be response rate, sure. Could be our proximity to Google, which manages to hire C++ devs just fine (fully a half of their codebase is C++).

We've managed to hire some folks after all, with some remedial training they're doing fine. I just wish it wasn't so hard to find them, and they wouldn't require months of close supervision after you hire them.

[mahyarm]

How about all the embedded engineers who go on to become RoR engineers because it pays much better?

Google is probably willing to train people too, which might be a difference for you. C++ isn't that fun of a language compared to others too.

[pjmlp]

Yes, when I graduated in the 90's, we had Pascal, C++, C, Prolog, Caml Light, Java, PL/SQL, Assembly (x86 and MIPS), Tarski's World language, Lisp, Algol, PL/I.

Those like myself doing compiler related classes got to additionally explore Forth, Oberon, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Modula-2, Modula-3, Eiffel, Ada, Concurrent C, Objective-C, *Lisp, Sather, C+@ [1] among a few others I cannot remember now.

As Wirth puts it, it is all about algorithms and data structures, in an abstract way.

[1] - In case you never heard about this obscure relative of C++ at Bell Labs, http://www.drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=184409085&sit...

[giancarlostoro]

Mine was a little less about patterns in some cases (2 year school though) and you got to take plenty of different programming classes from Web, to C to C++, Scripting Languages, C#, Java, and others. After it all I somewhat try my best to be language agnostic, with sane reasoning, I will raise my concerns if I know the faults of a language. It would be silly to just code in any language asked to and never raise concerns or offer alternatives if they fit your workflow better.

[renox]

I agree: in my French school we had to learn assembly language, C, Prolog and Lisp. Clearly Prolog and Lisp were taught to us for the different paradigm they introduce not because they expected us to use Prolog and Lisp in our jobs..