[luau] ics412: operating systems

[T. David Burns]

At 06:42 PM 9/30/2002 -0700, Eric Hattemer wrote:
>A lot of other universities have taken Java and objects as the greatest
>new thing ever.  They preach these, and consider C to be old and
>obsolete.


This probably has a lot to do with the problem - java is used almost 
exclusively outside of the OS courses at UH.

OOP and procedural are different paradigms, and when you're just getting 
started it's confusing to have to switch. Also, UH is typical of CS 
programs in that it really is not set up to teach you practical skills but 
to make sure you're familiar with a lot of theories and concepts. It's hard 
to learn to program in a university, at least not in class, at least not 
the sort of programming that people will offer to pay you money to do. It's 
more likely that you'll learn on the job. Or you could take some summer 
time (or do an independent study?) working on a real open source project. 
Though even that is fairly limited if you don't get much F2F with other 
programmers. But at least you'll be working on code that is not all yours.

To be fair, I don't think anyone is saying C is completely obsolete, are 
they? I'd say they just want to foil the imperialistic tendencies of a 
language that was designed for and is excellent for OS development, but has 
no particular business being the standard implementation language for 
application development. Or are they really suggesting that C++ should be 
used for OS development too? Are they going to write java VMs in java and 
cross-compile them somehow? Or beg the hardware designers to put a VM on a 
chip for us?

Didactic Dave