The world becomes a little bit safer

Posted: March 19th, 2008 | Author: kevin | Filed under: Programming, Programming Languages | View Comments

Leading Canadian University drops Java in favour of Scheme for first year students

A human yell registering over 350 decibels was heard today in Raleigh, North Carolina. Reginald Dunlop, who was rendered deaf due to his close proximity to the yell, was forced to rely on ASL interpreters in order to speak with this reporter. Mr. Dunlop believes the yell may have been the two words “hell” and “yeah”. “I was coming out of Starbuck’s with a venti half-caf no-foam skim extra hot triple latte”, Mr. Dunlop recalled, “when I heard the yell. I became immediately aware of what I can only describe as pure human joy. Very, very, very loud human joy. My ears began to ring immediately and they felt like someone had slapped them with two very large hams.” Raleigh Police are still searching for the cause of the yell.

If only the local engineering school would stop perpetrating Java on its poor unsuspecting CompSci students. Yes, NCSU, I’m looking right at you. Stop it.


  • The word is apparently that NCSU has been getting better. So they claim. Haven't seen the evidence to back it up -- using Java for graduate level operating systems class or data structures is surely criminal; but training people to enjoy building soul sucking web apps versus thinking for themselves should be a capital offense. It's industry whoring and I'd rather have a few sharp programmers in Rogue Language X than 50 drones. What I've heard lately has definitely kept me from wanting to persue any further education with them.

    FWIW, MIT was doing Scheme in '97 when NCSU was still doing C++ (C would have been much better, but hey). I went to the meetings protesting the Java changeover. We failed. Anything would be better as that mentality is kind of useless in the field unless you are trying to train java programmers -- I spent about 3 years intentionally unlearning much of what they taught me. Then I said students would not be learning low level design skills, and, guess what, they aren't... worse, they come out with the "there is only one language" mentality and design you know what...

    I think Scheme is better for Moose migration simulation anyway.
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