informatics-sapm.blogspot.co.uk
As part of a university course, I wrote a blog post on why scripting languages should be encouraged by the university professors for courseworks and how this will help students learn more.
What is your opinion on the topic?
In hindsight, my own experience with university coursework was pretty horrible. It was taken as a given that everyone would use C++ for everything. Yet, it generally remained woeful C++ because no feedback was given on technique. Some diversity would have been nice so that I could have graduated sucking in three languages rather than just the one :)
Even a modern low-level language like Go or OCaml is “better” than C(++), as memory safety rules our a majority of bugs. While everybody should understand the lowest level basics, there are modern languages with extraordinary features and great performance (2–300 times C) out there to get the actual job done.
You could have also noted that the choice of the language is largely irrelevant if the code is tested by language-agnostic tests. This would allow the lecturer to specify a number of languages that are available, and require the students to include a makefile to compile/build the actual project.