There's a chap at the end of our street who has a similar "the first hit is free" maketing plan. I'll give them both a miss; heroin is terribly bad for the complexion and learing VB.NET means you have to work with clowns.

At least not for me,

At university i had to learn both Visual Basic.NET (2003 and 2005 derivative) and VC++, this was on top of learning MATLAB for analysis and design (acoustics and algorithmic simulation)

At work i use Borland C++ builder and i also code quite a lot in PHP.

I didn't do a computer science course, those i know who did only seem to play with Java - ever. I disagree with that, you should be able to know the basics in all of the common languages and then specialise in one.

More of my thoughts are at www.wilmott.com/blogs/dcfc

To Dave,

I did say that MS has a minority/declining market share at Uni, not that it was extinct. About 70% of the entry level CVs I read do not mention any MS technology at all. That's not say they don't use MS, but if I were MS that would scare me.

VB.NET is extremely rare, indeed I only used the qualified "almost unknown", because I assumed that I can't know everything.

I actually quite like VC++ as a teaching environment, indeed I have gone on record saying it's the best place to learn C++, YMMV.

Chris:

Some of the top employers agree about the value of engineering vs CS degrees. A stupid % of CS grads seem only to have done Java, no meaningful Lisp, Haskell, SQL, C++, Ruby, Perl, or anything that might make the poor dears think.

did you go to King's College ? Sounds that way, indeed I've helped some EEE people leave KCL, since I'm a headhunter.

We avoid even talking to KCL CS grads, it makes me sad.

Not a fan of the KCL course though, since the dimwits teach O/S internals in Java, just like the shambling morons who taught you.

RTOS is a fine component for a techie education.

You may reasonably say "who cares if an obscure journalist says my CS course is crap" ? I'm not famous as a journo, and am pathetically grateful to the Reg for letting me witter on :)

But I am *very* well known as a headhunter for banks, and that's easily the best paid destination for a smart developer. That's not just C++ of course, C# is also doing well for various reasons. Java is used for the dross end of banking work, and for the sort of work that is much the same at JP Morgan as at Tesco.

It's also exactly the kids of work that is most likely to be outsourced.

I've tried to get KCL to explain their "rationale" for teaching braind damaged shit to their kids, but my (surprisingly polite) emails were just ignored.

learning UNIX and C at uni? You lucky, lucky etc. etc. We were subjected to using 1st gen Macs as terminals to code ADA and Pascal on (IIRC) ICL Level 80s, and Occam on transputers(!).

So, that's an education that's served me well in the real world....

I did UNIX, C++, java, asm, perl, asp, php, and pl-sql

So asp was as microsofty as it got

Most of the best programmers I've known haven't got degrees at all. And most of the rest consider their degree three years of their life that they can't get back.

(Not that a headhunter for banks would ever be interested in placing them of course - or vice versa.)

Of course, headhunters ARE interested in placing good programmers in the banks no matter if they have degree or not. Their money are paid from client satisfaction, which is NOT measured in number of diplomas in R&D deps. Quite the opposite, banks tend to be the most pragmatic employers in regard of actual skills - theirs income strongly depend on it.

I graduated in 05' from York. I started having done a bit of Turbo Pascal and being a bit of an all round Maths/Science geek. First course, Principle of Programming in LISP, onto Ada, C, C++, B, Assembler etc etc. No mention of Java but I decided to do my final year project in it. I now work for a big bank doing C#, .NET, Sql, Perl but I wonder whether id be as good a programmer if id just done Java. I think not, but that doesn't discredit Java or .NET as very useful platforms.

C++ for writing fast code, Java for slapping something together quickly that will (eventually) get the job (or a job) done, asp for creating inadvertent back doors into servers, .NET for making clock tower snipers out of programmers...

I also did the York CS course (4 yr MEng), graduated in 2001.

The great thing about the York course was that you were taught languages as a tool for teaching the concepts, not as an end in itself. LISP is great for fundamentals of programming, ADA is great for realtime and concurrancy, C for compiler design, Prolog (really) for Constraint Optimisation and Operations Research coding, etc... You learnt the concepts, and that there is more than one way to write a computer program.

I left York having used a dozen different languages (and a bunch more in my spare time). I can pick up the fundamentals of a new language in a few hours. A *good* CS degree teaches fundamentals, which you can then use to learn specific technologies. Technologies change over time, if you can't keep up with them because you were only taught "the one true way", then you are going to get screwed over in the job market in time.

@Norman, can't argue with you on that one as I've met so few profeessional programmers without a degree of some-sort. However, I have met some damn good ones who did EE or Chemistry, and even Law in one case. I've also met some terrible ones. It's all very much dependent on the kind of work you are doing, what your priorities are, and the individual in question. Coding safety critical systems (what I used to do) is very different from slinging out Perl for web/network applications (what I do now).

>"Like most recruitment agents the author has learned a few buzzwords, and read a few opinion pieces"

The author has debugged O/S code for IBM and MS, worked on the first Intel Unix, and earned good money coding. And although I agree you can teach O/S theory in Java, you can't do the practicals.

As for C#, I did not say it was great, partly because I don't think it is. I was observing there is commercial demand for it, as there is for Java.

I don't have a problem with Cs doing UIs, and don't really care whether it is 2% or 20% of the practical work. Most coursework is about the techniques and theory, and so UIs are as valid as databases or reading files.

UI is a fine place to teach OO, since of course a lot of that emerged from GUI research.

Same applies to lots of CS study, quicksort and the blackboard pattern are as valid in Java as C++. But my problem is kids only learning one language, which often leaves them with a very restricted view of the world.

I'm not anit-Java, I'm depressed reading the CVs of students who seem unable to get beyond it.

...it's how you learn.

When I was a gap-year student working for IBM, they spent part of the initial training course teaching us APL. This was not because we were expected to have any need of it, but because they were pretty sure that none of us would know anything about it. They wanted to teach us to learn, not to give us knowledge, and wanted us to all start at the same level.

Blimy. Java gets a really bad rap on this thread. We have many desktop environments in which we have to write software for. These include Macs, Windows (many variants), Linux and wait for it... OS/400 (or i5/OS). We chose Java using Eclipse RCP. We do not have to recompile for each platform incl i5/OS, which is fantastic!!

What other language/platform would you all use?

And, i started off with COBOL, yep! Then Pascal, then C/C++ and on to Java. This is along with SQL programming. Try getting your head around Common Table Expressions!!

Java really does have its place.

>While I still think it is incorrect to slate CS grads who have been taught mainly Java,

Agreed, my gripe was CS grads who seem *only* to have been taught Java. If there existed a course where there was only C++ or only Lisp, I'd say the same.

>It's sad that CS is becomming so undervalued in the industry.

Agreed

>I'm sure we're not too far off the day when course CS101 is 'How to use MS Word'.

You're wrong.

We passed that some time ago. I find "CS" grads who boast of having done website design in pretty looking tools.

>CS grads will never be the answer for all programming jobs in every industry

Yes, but why ?

One would not have physics grads doing dentistry, so why are CS grads so unable to demonstrate superiority on their home ground ?

. We serve a purpose, and the skill of a recruitment consultant is to know what that purpose is. Generalising about the languages we learn is missing the point.

Anyway, how did an article on free MS tools become a rant by me on degree courses? :)

Paris has a depressingly modern view of art.

Michaelangelo knew more about the physical properties of marble than any scientist of the time. Leonardo da Vinci more about physiology of his subjects than the doctors who might treat them for illness.

Before the 20th century, painters would be educated in the formulation of their paints, and even recently Sebastian Bell could mend and upgrade flutes.

But sadly "understanding" your materials and instruments is now seen as "geekish".

A friend of mine was recently interviewing media studies graduates to a plum job working on the next Harry Potter and James Bond films.

Not one seemed even to be aware that with paints colours are composed by subtraction, but colours on a screen are made by adding.

Her view was that there was something missing in media studies "they should teach them how to give blow jobs, as it is the only way they'll get a job in this buisiness".

I have no time for so called "developers" who think understanding stack frames or disk i/o is "beneath them". You don't always need to think about pointers, and Java may well be the right choice for a given job, but if you only know one tool, and only a few ways to use it, then there is little chance that you've chosen the right one.

The author's observations on university curricula may be representative of his experience or the UK, but they're nothing like my experience here in the US.

PHP becoming the part of the defacto environment for universities teaching CS while VB.NET is virtually unknown? I've never heard of a PHP course being offered by a university, but I've helped many people working on their business degrees (including the hybrid business/IT degree) with their VB.NET coursework. At Arizona State, all the would-be accountants and finance majors have to take at least one VB.NET course.

I have a BSE in Computer Systems Engineering from ASU (cross between EE and CS). While it's true that Java was heavily favored, the University was usually pretty good at picking the right tool for the course. C for the O/S course, Assembly for the embedded systems course, Lisp for the AI course, SQL (on MS Access - yuck) for the DB course, and Java for the data structures and algorithms courses. I would guess this is fairly common, as it appears that even the semi-evolved monkeys running ASU figured it out.

"If I want someone to write UI code I look for good graphics skills and then C# or PHP."

I assume this was a joke...You can't really think there's a relationship between knowing C# and/or PHP and writing good UI code. In a typical 3-tier environment (DB, BL, UI) C#, Java, and PHP are strong in the middle and weak at the ends. They are piss-poor UI languages. You should reconsider your hiring criteria.