This three page article about the role that Java has played in university Computer Science curricula foreshadows the ultimate effect of what would happen to other fields in the event that they have to get more students by any means necessary for political reasons. The tendency of Computer Science departments to shy away from more complicated languages like C and Ada in favor of Java has done a lot to keep students from having to learn anything that comes even close to touching on the hardware. The decision was made to use Java in no small part because of the way that it could make things a lot easier for students and provide them a few good marks on their resumes.
The problem with using Java as a teaching language is twofold: it provides libraries that do a ridiculous number of things for you, and it abstracts away many of the hardware-related headaches like debugging a crashed program. Java stacktraces are like night and day from the infamous SEGFAULT common to C/C++ programs when they crash. Students who never really get a basic grip on C or a similar low-level language will have a very hard time should they ever need to do work that isn't entirely managed by the Java runtime.
And yet, there are a lot of people who eek out a place in their Computer Science program being almost utterly incapable of writing simple programs in Java. These people would have been naturally forced out of the major early on had the requirements been tougher by using a more difficult language like C or Ada. So, instead, what we get is students who really have no place in the field graduating, entering the workforce almost completely incapable of competing, and thus far worse off had pressures been applied early on to make them choose a new, less flashy major that was better suited to them.
The fact is, if you think that this sort of situation sounds bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet when it comes to what will happen if political pressure creates a quota system to bring in warm female bodies to fill up seats in the sciences. Applying Title IX like that would not only bring in and do a great disservice to many unqualified women, but it would also open the door to many unqualified men who are attracted by the potential to get a flashy degree with less effort.
I dunno Mike. I was taught Assembler, in addition to Ada, C, C++, Fortran and all the others.
While Assembler was useful to picture what was really happening at the machine level, the remaining 7 semesters of my work was done with a higher level language with way more abstraction.
Perhaps what you are seeing is just a realization that the majority of the work will be done with higher-level stuff, with only a few CompEng guys caring about what happens at the JRE level and below.
But I do agree with you about the possible effect of Title Nining CS departments combined with AA hiring preferences in industry.
The first language I was ever exposed to was C, which I think gave me an advantage over the majority of my peers at JMU, whose first language was Java. I'm not a particularly good C programmer because I lack real experience with it, but it's definitely not foreign to me either. I think most of my peers would have been better off had they been taught C AND Java their first two years, interchangeably, since C is a procedural language and would make them have to totally rethink their approach to stuff like data structures.
The problem, though, as I see it is that a lot of the cool work still requires a decent knowledge of languages that are capable of getting down and dirty with the hardware. That's why I've been trying to figure out ways to get more experience on the side doing C programming. I hate C++; it's a terrible language in my opinion (C# and Java, when combined with C, can do anything that C++ can, but more elegantly IMO).
Ah, FORTRAN. The bad old days.