Re: Computer Science and PHP

Hmm, well I'm 20 years removed from college at this point, but I can relate somewhat to the issue ... the tail end of my college life was when the IBM PC was introduced and I can assure you there were no classes in 'small systems' of any kind despite the fact that many could see the future --- Certainly some things have changed, but I think the college v. scripting languages issue is this: College still views CompSci as a science/engineering discipline and I think they still use the classics -- Aho's Dragon Book, Knuth's Algorithm stuff etc. -- all this more prepares you for life as a kernel hacker than a web scripter ... and I believe that appropriate; I think no one would disagree that if your a competent C hacker you can probably pick up PHP in a couple hours and go "hey this is cool!" -- If anything you could argue the converse side that languages like PHP ... and ASP and Python ... pick your poision; have resulted in a lot of people being drawn to programming in a casual way which is great for web pages and the like, but there are also a lot of people calling themselves programmers that really couldn't code their way out a paper bag at a lower level, nor understand anything below the highlevel scripting API. I think you could have an interesting side debate here about the shift toward teached in OOP as a paradigm. I think you look those two points and I can understand why you see Java in a lot of cirriculums ... it's OO, it's easier than C, yet you can code most anything you want without obsfuncticating the low level stuff with a over-simple API. I really don't like Java myself, but I can see why it's popular as a teaching language. Just my $0.02 On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 06:57:07PM -0500, Francesco Gallarotti wrote: > I am a student in a college in NY state. Here we have several servers and > dozens of courses on computer science. No server is PHP ready and no course > instructor knows anything about PHP. Why do you think this is happening? I > really like PHP and I am using it in my personal website to work with some > text files and a small database. Why PHP is so not popular in the computer > science teaching area? > > F.G. > > > > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-general-unsubscribe@lists.php.net > For additional commands, e-mail: php-general-help@lists.php.net > To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net > -- Hank Marquardt <hank@yerpso.net> http://web.yerpso.net GPG Id: 2BB5E60C Fingerprint: D807 61BC FD18 370A AC1D 3EDF 2BF9 8A2D 2BB5 E60C *** Web Development: PHP, MySQL/PgSQL - Network Admin: Debian/FreeBSD *** PHP Instructor - Intnl. Webmasters Assn./HTML Writers Guild *** Beginning PHP -- Starts January 7, 2002 *** See http://www.hwg.org/services/classes