Anil Gangolli

Stanford's Undergrad Java Certification Curriculum

Most of the recent interview of Alan Kay by Stuart Feldman in the ACM Queue (this one also suggested by a friend) is really good stuff.

On page 4 , however, after soundly beating Java down and glorifying Lisp and Smalltalk, he says:

AK: ... I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

SF: Well, I must admit I was surprised recently when I discovered in a group of very good developers I managed, almost none of them knew C well enough to write expert low-level stuff. All of them were really good Java jocks.

So I bothered to look up the current undergrad CS requirements . It’s been over 20 years since I was an undergrad there. My undergrad degree was in Mathematical Sciences, by the way, before the advent of the undergrad CS degree at Stanford; but I helped to define the early versions of the undergrad curriculum as a grad student. To my untrained eye, it doesn’t look like a Java certification course at all. It looks pretty sound; it may be a little short on depth, but as an undergraduate there, you’re expected to be getting a liberal education spanning a lot of other material outside of the major.

Feldman’s subsequent statement doesn’t surprise me at all, but I’m not sure he was talking about Stanford folks. It might even be seen as a backhanded compliment to the state of Java. Besides, from the way Kay’s talking, who needs C anyway? C’s even further from the Nirvana that Smalltalk offers. What would really bug Kay I suspect is that the developers Feldman mentions have probably never even written “Hello world!” in Smalltalk.

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Posted at 12:33AM Feb 10, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink