I find it always amusing when highly intelligent people start arguing about the pros and cons of computer languages. They are all designed to fill a need to accomplish certain tasks. As people have different needs, they will use different tools. The degree of complexity is no measure for comparing one language with another. Languages evolve from simple to more complex to accommodate more and more sophisticred needs. The C++ language bears evidence to this. This makes it more valuable rather than less. For just understanding basic concepts ObjectiveC is a fine language. To all of you, Best Wishes for the New Year. John On December 31, 2003 11:45 am, Tim Writer wrote:

Jing Su <jingsu-26n5VD7DAF2Tm46uYYfjYg at public.gmane.org> writes:

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But computer science curriculums mainly (only?) push the Thread model when talking about concurrent execution. I've met many people that have a hard time working with asynch event systems, which is too bad. It's actually quite clean and simple once you get the gist of it.

There's a famous quote from Alan Cox which goes something like this:

Threads are for programmers who don't understand state machines. Computers are state machines.

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I wonder what the software landscape would be like if curriculums started with ObjectiveC instead of Java, and moved on to concurrent asynch events instead of threads.

I'd like to see them teach two very different languages in parallel in the first year, e.g. Java and Scheme. I suppose you could argue ObjectiveC is two very different languages rolled into one. :)

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