Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!decwrl!petunia!polyslo!jdudeck
From: jdudeck@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (John R. Dudeck)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: comp.lang.functional
Message-ID: <25ffdf21.179d@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>
Date: 15 Mar 90 18:29:53 GMT
References: <9003131617.AA02925@decwrl.dec.com>
Reply-To: jdudeck@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (John R. Dudeck)
Organization: Cal Poly State University -- San Luis Obispo
Lines: 23


In article <9003131617.AA02925@decwrl.dec.com> graeme@omero.enet.dec.com (Graeme Harker) writes:
>the Americans seem singularly uninterested in functional
>languages. 

I am a Master's-level student in Computer science, and when I came to this
school, I was surprised to find very little interest in functional languages
here.  The "core" languages are Modula2 (soon to be replaced by Ada), and
C.  There is considerable interest in C++, Objective C, and Object-oriented
programming in general, but aside from AI courses, our only exposure to
functional languages is in a general course on programming languages.

Having seen that the concensus here is along these lines, I find it 
unusual to see that in other parts of the world it is ML that is the 
standard language, and C is only looked at as a "get your hands dirty"
language.   That is the attitude that people have here for Basic, Fortran,
or Cobol, but certainly not for C or Ada.

I suppose that there really is a significant difference in the mainstream
mentality of our educational institutions, between Europe-&-Commonwealth and
America.  Of course there are considerable differences between schools in
the US, but overall we have a concern for preparing students for industry/
business, and there is very little learning for learning's sake.

-- 
John Dudeck                           "You want to read the code closely..." 
jdudeck@Polyslo.CalPoly.Edu             -- C. Staley, in OS course, teaching 
ESL: 62013975 Tel: 805-545-9549          Tanenbaum's MINIX operating system.