Delphi – The Programming Language of Education

I think that the amount of churn in the industry contributes to the disconnect between businesses and academia. Even if the languages are rather similar (as with C# and Java), the supporting libraries and surrounding ecosystem differ and there will be an adjustment period. When hiring someone long-term, the loss of a couple of weeks (or even months) as an employee becomes proficient in the new environment is not a big deal.

With people changing jobs every couple of years though (whether it's due to the need for the developer to face new challenges or due to per-project hiring by the business), that amount of reduced/lost productivity is hard on the bottom line.

Having said that, if universities insist on using languages that don't at least support the concepts that current business languages employ, they run the risk of eventually cutting themselves out of the business of producing developers as people realize that dropping 10s of thousands of dollars on a piece of paper that doesn't even get you a job is a bad idea.

This tension will probably remain as the balance sways back and forth between the two camps.

"Although Delphi, unlike its predecessor Pascal, was not designed for teaching, it is still held to be a stable language that teaches problem solving as well as programming."

Maybe this is true for Delphi; but I don't understand this school of thought when it comes to explaining why a language like Python is in the same list as Delphi. These languages are very different; and I don't recommend at all learning Python for "problem solving" courses, since it is less strict than a classic OOP language. Python came along to solve problems that arose in OOP languages, so learning Python before mastering at least one OOP language wont be wise (IMO).

I don't think it's wise to learn so many programming languages in the first year or two; one is enough. If you start mixing in allot of languages, students will miss out the main reason for Computer Science - automating tasks, and solving problems.

Also, if problem solving is the main goal here, why is .NET in the list? I use .NET allot just because it solves allot of the problems for me in advance; so teaching a language like VB.NET (or even Java) will not help in teaching the students how to solve basic problems; they will always find some sort of class that solves it for them.

And why is VB there? What does that have to do with OOP?

This is at A-Level which most take between the ages of 16 and 18 so I don't think specific languages are too important. Most will pick up a range of languages and never really stop learning anyway.

A better thing would be to show the students a couple of languages with very different ideas such as Python and Java. So they don't get locked into one way of thinking.

I think you hit the nail on the head with your second argument. I've always believed that you can be a great programmer without knowing a single programming language. The underlying requirements to any programming task revolve around identifying and solving problems, not choosing a particular language.

Learning a foreign language requires more than just memorizing a list of vocabulary words in much the same way that learning how to develop requires more than just learning syntax. I could memorize a Spanish dictionary*, but that doesn't mean I'd be able to construct a comprehensible sentence without a familiarity with declensions or conjugation.

The idea that universities should focus on a "popular" language is silly. And it's the reason that I had to waste a semester learning Cold Fusion. Rather than put a focus on the client-server relationship and web development at a high-level, we poured over tasks that were specific to Cold Fusion and lost sight of the greater picture.

* There's actually no way I'd be able to do this

I started programming in assembler and basic, when I did my degree I studied COBOL, Fortran, C, Assembler and Pascal. I have to say that Fortran taught me what bad habbits I'd picked up using BASIC, Pascal was an excellent language for teaching structure and formatting - I found it hard to write messy unclear code in pascal, I found C to be almost as fine grained as assembler but often without the self control that assembler demanded (I prefered Assembler for this reason!). COBOL was a real useful language and very productive when developing in a clients frame work - definitely a cut and paste job for much of the code. I now use VB.NET but as others have said I have been incontact with people who had memorised the book of syntax (I use intellisense!) who can't problem solve for toffee...

I think a broad basis is very important and (genral - A level degrees and the like) education should NOT be too tied to the technology of the day - these are long term learnings not conversion to C# courses. To take a short term view of things and offer courses based around todays technology is to loose site of what education is about (IMHO)