Re: [ALACPP] Advice for a teacher, please

[Ray Tayek <rtayek@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 06:09 PM 9/12/03 -0700, you wrote:
> ...
> The Computer Science Program at the private school where I now teach is 
> geared toward preparing students for the AP Computer Science Exam, which 
> is heavy on C++, and is adding Java. The school is also interested in 
> having them leave with exceptional real-world programming skills whether 
> or not they go on to study Computer Science at college.

this is a *big* job :(


> Students who wish to embark on this endeavor spend their senior year 
> learning advanced C++ techniques and Java.
> This is preceded by a year of more basic C++ techniques.
> The beginning C++ course in turn (and this where we get to the actual 
> question) is preceded by a course in C, ...
>
> We are about to enter discussions for curriculum changes, and my gut 
> feeling is that the C class should go, with a little bit of C being 
> incorporated into one of the other courses.  It's 45 minutes a day, five 
> days a week, for a full 10 months.

might be too long unless you are giving them a lot of data structures and 
algorithms

>  My opinion is that this is entirely too much C for a curriculum in which 
> the students are destined to move away from it. One thing on my side is 
> that most of the students who took the C course last year (before I 
> started working there) did not sign up for the more advanced course, but 
> I would like more.

that could be just a popularity thing. you will get many different opinions 
about this. i favor java as a first language because of its simplicity (the 
language not the libraries), no c, because most people will never need to 
get under the hood, but many people will disagree (correctly for example if 
they are engineers who are doing embedded stuff). so do you have a computer 
science type of curriculum or is it more hardware and engineering?


> I personally learned C++ from the get-go about 8 years ago when I began to 
> study object-oriented programming, picking up some C along the way over 
> the years, and I feel fine about it.

i learned c first (after algol, fortran, cobol, basic and pascal), so it 
was terse and cryptic at first. used c for about 10 years and then started 
learning c++ and then java. while parts of me can love the intricacies of 
c++ (you really can do anything you want :), i think it's just too darn 
complicated for most people. in c, what you see is what you get. in c++ you 
can have no clue as to what the source is doing.


> However, I think I probably have the least industry experience of anyone 
> on this list, so I'd like your expert input:
>
> How much C do you really need to get the most out of C++?

if that is the question, then my answer is quite a bit; keep the class if 
that is your goal.

but i suspect that most people will be using java, c# or vb.net. i do not 
see the market share of c++ growing. business wants tools, languages and 
processes that can be used by people that can be easily replaced and 
brought up to speed when the truck hits some of the team. c++ fails 
miserably in this area.

thanks

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