I’m someone who studied Devine (where you will be teaching from now on)

I had absolutely no programming experience as I didn’t even study Informatics in secundary school.

What I experienced at Devine was learning a language: (AS3, HTML) but not learning the principles behind it: What I mean is learning which thing is what. But tbh I have no idea OOP is all about. If u are a copycat person and just learn everything mindlessly or when u have a nice basic of programming u will succeed, but as someone who has no basic and isn’t someone who learns without knowing what it is or does u are doomed to fail imo.

U see I quit devine obviously

In 2009 we’ll surely see many conversions to Open Source.

I believe the technologies of choice used to teach the concepts should be those that are most relevant to the local companies. I have no idea if that is taken into consideration universally, though. I have read stories of colleges having “X Degree” because they are located near “X Industry”; although I don’t have a specific example.

That said, however, in many situations it’d be hard to fault a college for choices; perhaps using .NET over Java.

We have a few colleges that specifically teach multimedia design and development rather than just a general computer science curriculum (and doing an excellent job at that by the way). As a result there is a real focus on Flash Platform products on top of generic OO and programming skills.

I think its important Adobe makes ColdFusion attractive as a product to teach to these students who will be the next batch out in the workplace with relevant skills to take on the next generation of RIA development.

http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2008/03/02/devine-digital-design-and-media/

We agree that college won’t produce experts / specialists. Only real world experience will generate those.

There are just to many different technologies for a college to cover all of them in a single curriculum. The focus should not be on technology but on concepts.

I would expect a curriculum to cover OO programming concepts, but I wouldn’t expect it to cover Smalltalk, C++, Java, and all the other languages ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming_language ).

I would expect a curriculum to cover Procedural programming concepts, but I wouldn’t expect it to cover Pascal, C, Basic, and all of the other languages ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Procedural_programming_languages ).

I would expect a curriculum to cover database design; but I wouldn’t expect them to cover MS Access, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostGres, DBase, SQLLite, and every other db platform in existence.

[etc.. etc.. etc..]

The fact is that there are too many technologies out there to cover them all. At some point someone must have made a decision of one over the other. To fault them for not including “X” is short sighted.

I wish @aral had spent the time reading well balanced posts like yours before jumping in half-cocked and illinformed and spreading unnecessary FUD everywhere. his obvious ignorance just made him look like a fool.

good on yer for taking the time to write this.

Common ColdFusion Arguments 2009

It talks about progress in the CFML world since my previous, somewhat challenging, post on this subject a year ago.