Nathan posted about the evil that gawk can drive a sane computer scientist to do.
I'm not sure why gawk attracts such fans, but I know they're out there.
Along similar lines, a scripting course has been proposed for CSe next semester, and it will taught using perl and CGI. From talking with students and industry I gather that .NET is becoming (has become) a more attractive platform for developing web-based applications, so I've been (unsuccessfully) trying to push for the course to include, if not be based upon, .NET.
Of course opinions are welcome to be posted here, but if you feel strongly you might talk with the course's potential instructor aobut this.
That post made me laugh out loud. But that could just be because my brain has gone silly from all of the vi and gawk.
On a serious note, I think that .NET should defintely be taught. I have a friend who graduated from Wash U with a degree in CS and now does .NET programming exclusively. It would be nice to at least have the chance in school to learn these tools.
However, if the class is taught by a certain professor I can see it already.
First day of class:
"Perl is evil! Emacs is evil! Use gawk and vi. They are pure. They are part of UNIX. They are like Audrey Hepburn! Why does this campus smell so bad?!?!?"
Posted by: Nathan at September 18, 2003 12:07 PM
There do seem to be a lot of people who are doing .NET work these days. But I would guess that there are just as many who are using JSP and Struts (essentially, the Java version of .NET). And JSP and Struts are a bit more appealing because you can run them without buying things like IIS server and Visual Studio.NET.
Also, I hope the scripting course covers php. My impression has been that more people are using php these days than are using Perl and cgi.
Posted by: david at September 18, 2003 1:17 PM
Quote: "I know they're out there."
Seems like there are two ways to parse this...
Posted by: Adam at September 19, 2003 10:12 PM
I agree with David. J2EE is a much more mature platform. The company I work for is using j2ee extensively. They tried to use .net, but it was found lacking.
I also recommend teaching the following:
ant(portable, xml based make files, and so much more)
mvc2(the architecture that struts is based on)
tiles
commons logging
etc.
Struts in Action by Ted Husted would be a great text book.
Posted by: clint at September 24, 2003 3:50 PM
... and I would require all 101 and 102 students to run Checkstyle on their code before submitting it. There is even a plugin for emacs...
Posted by: clint at September 24, 2003 5:34 PM