I came across an interesting article called Should Java be banned from schools?.
The most interesting part were the comments. One of them rang a bell:
Also, no CS study is complete without some messing with machine level instructions, compilers & interpreters, algorithms, etc. Forget about learning a language: a good CS student must be able to design and build language + tool set from scratch. Here’s a CPU manual, go implement language foobar for it. Don’t come back until its compiler can bootstrap itself.
The problem is that many so-called universities don’t teach all this stuff. These second rate universities are popping up all over the world. They’re called universities but they are just processing mediocre programmers into cubicle occupying, php/Java/VB hacking zombies.
There is a lot of truth in that. Discuss.
PS: My favourite anti-Java article is The Perils of Java Schools – mind you, I like (and teach) Java…
PPS: The above image shown Emacs, my current Erlang IDE. I teach Erlang to my Concurrent Programming & Parallel Processing students.