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Comment by odyssey7 | Hacker News Reader

Oracle influenced / bought academia into teaching Java for a generation. See Dijkstra’s criticisms[1] from the time, from when his department was forced to stop teaching Haskell to undergrads for political reasons. Note that Haskell had not been too hard for Dijkstra’s undergrads.

Later, Python took its place, since people realized the Java ecosystem was way too complicated and was turning off would-be CS students. Python directly targeted the academic use case by having similarities to C, Java, and Bash——it was not a better language, it just made existing imperative and object-oriented assignments easier for classroom environments. Believe it or not, a lot of programmers and even academics sort of give up on exploring significantly unfamiliar directions after graduating.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/OtherDocs/To%20the%20Budget%2...

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Re Dijkstra:

He's asking for something that is really inappropriate. He lost in the CS department, and he wants the Budget Council to decide on what languages should be taught? Like they know anything about it!

He lost a political battle, and he's appealing it to the only place he can, and he's buttering them up to do it, but the people that actually know something about the topic decided against him already.

And, you're quoting only one side of the battle. One vocal and eloquent side, but only one side. Maybe look into why the UT CS department made that change? (And not why Dijkstra says they did.)

> He lost a political battle.

Political campaigns are often bought.

He mentions the expensive promotional campaign that was paid towards Java.

> the people that actually know something about the topic decided against him already

Matters of pedagogy often involve value judgements and trade-offs, with knowledge alone being unable to provide definitive answers.

However, Sun/Oracle did know that more money would flow their way if undergraduates were to learn Java. The letter suggests that one or both of them decided to act accordingly.

It’s questionable to assert that every knowledgeable faculty member thought that pivoting to Java was the best option. (Dijkstra himself is a counter-example?) From the looks of it, just a single department chair——not the full CS department——had the decision-making authority on this curriculum change.

> inappropriate

Would inappropriateness make his arguments any less true?

Why in an academic context would it be inappropriate to request input from additional stakeholders? If the letter was unconventional, remember that a purpose of the tenure system is to protect unconventionality.

The Budget Council is not a stakeholder in the CS curriculum. The Budget Council does not have the knowledge or expertise to say anything relevant about the matter - and Dijkstra should know that. That's why it's inappropriate.

I mean, look, if you had a letter signed by the majority of the department, complaining about the chair's decision, then the Budget Council might consider reversing the chair, on the authority of the expertise of the majority of the department. But overrule the chair on the basis of disagreement by one professor? No way. You can't run a university that way, because there's always at least one professor who disagrees with a decision.

An academic knows well that grants and other forms of financing are their lifeblood. It’s also how the government chooses its priorities within academia.

Admittedly, I don’t know anything about who was on the budget committee to which Dijkstra wrote this letter. But it is just ordinary for academics to write proposals outlining their priorities in hopes that the grant/budget/financing committee will bite.

I don't think that's it. I know plenty of people who were taught lisp first thing at university, and as soon as someone handed them an imperative language, they never looked at lisp again. And lisp is way easier than haskell IMO as IO is just a function and not a pilosophical concept

I wouldn’t assume that your colleagues were less capable as undergrads than the students that Dijkstra encountered at UT Austin.

Imperative languages do offer many advantages over Haskell, in that most coursework and industry jobs use them and that, consequently, their ecosystems are much further developed. These advantages are a consequence of university programs' alignment with the imperative and object-oriented programming paradigms, to Oracle's benefit.

Your colleagues having never looked back at lisp is hardly evidence that Haskell would have been too difficult for them or that Oracle didn’t have a hand in this.

I don't think that holds water. We've had functional programming for longer than oracle or java have existed, and for far longer than oracle has owned java. Haskell itself has been around for longer than java or oracle-owned java.

Functional programming just seems harder for people to get into. Perhaps it's bad for everyone that people don't make that effort, but it doesn't seem like a conspiracy

My mistake, at the time, Java was being promoted by Sun Microsystems, which only more recently became a part of Oracle.

The promotional campaign that Dijkstra mentions was perhaps orchestrated by Sun Microsystems, though perhaps not since Oracle was indirectly strategically aligned with Java, as the eventual acquisition shows.

Yes, it is more difficult to get into FP. However, asking the question why it became more difficult, when historically the opposite was true, is certainly worthwhile. Surely there was some cause.

> Oracle influenced / bought academia into teaching Java for a generation

I think you probably mean Sun? Or maybe that Oracle continued what Sun started.

Nah man, Oracle… here is a personal story. I was teaching at a Uni, introductory programming course. Dean hits me up and asks if I can teach introduction to web development as then current professor was going on maternity leave. I was like “heck yea, that sounds like fun.”

before the first class I get an email from one student asking if they must purchase the book for the class since it $275 (this is years ago) and I was taken aback, what kind of book costs $275 - even for a college textbook that was nuts. I told him to not purchase it until we meet for the first class. I go to the office and see my copy of the book, it is programming the web with oracle forms from oracle press!!!! I talked to Dean and he was like “yea, that is what we need to teach!” needless to say that, none of the kids bought the book, and I did NOT teach oracle forms, and I was never given that class again :)

That is wild

Thanks, I had unconsciously guessed Oracle, based on Dijkstra’s mention of Java’s expensive promotional campaign.

Sun and Oracle were strategically aligned at the time, so it could have been either or both.

My first CS class was in Scheme (R6 iirc), and the year after they switched to python. Then a thousand cries in failure to understand python metaclasses. They are garbage at the repl, and you have a distinct set of folks that edit their editors.

Most Python programmers don't really have to understand metaclasses or other advanced concepts like descriptors. The main metaclass they'd use would be to create abstract classes, and these days you can just subclass ABC.

I wish I'd have had either of those. C++ was the fad when I was going through, so freshmen learning how to write linked lists got a fast introduction to (and a hatred of) the STL.

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