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It seems that almost every day, this board gets a new user who is taught C using ancient compilers and litterature. I mean, someone has to be responsible for the neverending flow of students using TurboC, fflush(stdin) and void main(). Have any of you guys encountered this in college?
We have our fair share of CS students from the third world countries.
And community colleges... Historically, schools tend to avoid freeware to do their teaching, so that puts Dev-C++ and Code::Blocks out of the question... and when it comes to tax payer's money, I'm sure most citizens would rather have their community CS students learn on an older, cheaper compiler than cough up the money to subsidize for Visual Studios volume licenses.
I actually wondered exactly the same thing today (and I have done several times), when I saw gets used again. Ok, so you guys can explain why they use those compilers. But how come they still get taught about gets, "void main", etc?
Unless you claim that the compilers do not correcly compile code, ther is no reason not to learn on them. They may not support all teh features fo teh newer IDE's, but they work just fine. Additionally, by forcing the students to learn different compilers it makes them more flexible when new IDE's come out versus only learnign one IDE then gettgin to a job and nto beign able to adpat as quickly.
Believe it or dont, there is far more development work on console based programs than fancy GUI's. Induistrial computers almost invariably run some form of DOS/linux or directly compile their programming from a C file and until the western world started exportign their factories to the third world programmers for these systems were in big demand.
Hmm my school uses Dev-C++. We could use any compiler we want, too, as long as we submit standard-compliant code at the end (they graded using GCC). But that was a first year intro course, so I guess people who had no prior experience would be using Dev-C++. What's wrong with free programs? People just like to pay? :)
Products that you pay for tend to bear some kind of liability on the quality of their product and what it claims to do. This is not such a big deal for an individual, but it's a very big deal for an institution that tends to install software off of a localized server connected to hundreds or thousands of computers.Quote:
Originally Posted by cyberfish
My CS courses started with an intro, which was basic starter using C++, and didn't have much specific about the language. After that almost all courses allowed for their projects to be turned in using any language. Since languages have their quirks, I think they decided to let us learn those ourselves, rather than focusing on language-specifics in class.
I think whiteflags nailed it in one, and it's probably the case that anyone from a first-world country that's learning that is probably learning from an instructor taught in one of those third-world countries. Seems most "professors" aren't very cutting edge, even for very liberal definitions of the term.