"Dewar, a professor emeritus of computer science at New York University, believes that U.S. colleges are turning out programmers who are - there's no nice way to say this - essentially incompetent."
"A lot of it is, `Let's make this all more fun.' You know, `Math is not fun, let's reduce math requirements. Algorithms are not fun, let's get rid of them. Ewww - graphic libraries, they're fun. Let's have people mess with libraries. And [forget] all this business about `command line' - we'll have people use nice visual interfaces where they can point and click and do fancy graphic stuff and have fun."
I am both an APL user (k) and a spitbol user but still not a Python user. Regarding the later, I think I suffer from the Dewar perspective[1]: it's too easy and too focused on libraries. Perhaps this is misplaced, but for myself I feel k and spitbol are more "educational" than Python.
1. In truth, I have no idea if Dewar saw Python as he did Java and PHP.
"A lot of it is, `Let's make this all more fun.' You know, `Math is not fun, let's reduce math requirements. Algorithms are not fun, let's get rid of them. Ewww - graphic libraries, they're fun. Let's have people mess with libraries. And [forget] all this business about `command line' - we'll have people use nice visual interfaces where they can point and click and do fancy graphic stuff and have fun."
http://web.archive.org/web/20080128144630/http://itmanagemen...
The above is from an interview with Dewar about a paper he co-authored in 2008 concerning CS education and programming languages:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080103143526/http://www.stsc.hi...
I am both an APL user (k) and a spitbol user but still not a Python user. Regarding the later, I think I suffer from the Dewar perspective[1]: it's too easy and too focused on libraries. Perhaps this is misplaced, but for myself I feel k and spitbol are more "educational" than Python.
1. In truth, I have no idea if Dewar saw Python as he did Java and PHP.