when I was in high school, they presented a version of pascal for a few hours, that was it, no one really learned anything…
in university, there was c++ and java, only a few understood anything…
today, I highly doubt that any school has any reason to teach delphi/pascal when they can effectively use almost any language out there for FREE.
a few years ago, I wrote an “idealistic scenario” for delphi, where it would be free for schools, it would actively look to grow the community and make the product tangible cost wise for almost everyone out there; not sure if it would have worked or not, but today, I think it has a very small chance; it’s only focus should be in keeping it’s current customers, treat them good and try to improve the product to reduce the number of delphi products beeing rewritten in other languages such as c# and java.
Richard Baroniunas Two years ago they did announce this. South Africa used Delphi and Java and announced they were making Delphi the new, mandatory language. What happened next was that there was a full-scale revolt. A professor publicly denounced using an, outdated, commercial language rather than something popular, open source, and used in colleges. His criticisms were carried in the press and a website and many more educators signed a petition requesting to reverse the decision.
The SA education ministry put out a whitepaper justifying their decision and it was a DISASTER. I thought I still had a copy but don’t; I’ll have to dig it up again. It appeared to be written by someone who knew nothing about programming and borrowed information straight from the forums. It claimed that Delphi was very popular, particularly in America and Western Europe (ironically the two places it is least popular). It criticized unifying around Java because… brace yourselves… Java is open source, which means it might not be supported at some point and bugs won’t be fixed. JAVA. Java, the most popular programming language in the world. Java, backed by one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Oracle. That Java. It then went on to praise Embarcadero and since it was a commercial company that meant there was good support available (insert your own joke here).
Well, the protests were significant, with almost no one defending Delphi. In the end, South Africa backed down and stuck to its policy of school districts being able to choose for themselves between Delphi and Java. In its modern history, South Africa rose up to throw off two things… aparteid and Delphi. 🙁
Now Idera’s plan to get “back into education” turns out to be nothing but inventing a new “award” to give South Africa, along with giving them Delphi for free, to get them to try to force Delphi on school districts yet again.
Stay tuned… I’m sure the protests will return; I doubt this is a done deal yet.
Dorin Duminica Well said. It’s more than just that they can have any language for free though. Another problem is that Delphi is locked into running on Windows. Maybe young people (and some schools) today are running no OS X (Macbooks being very popular) or Linux. Now you’ve got two problems. The student can’t work on code at home unless they’re given free copies for home too. And even if they are, they might not run Windows.
There is also the fact that education today tends to be a big advocate of open source. In academia, knowledge is distributed for all to see; today it’s considered that publishing your idea isn’t enough if others don’t have/can’t afford the proprietary software to replicate your work. One also can’t see the source code to verify that proprietary product works correctly (big issue with math software).
Education and open source advocate John “Maddog” Hall gives talks in which he points out that open source software teaches kids three times: first, by letting them learn to program, second, they can look inside the code at the compiler and learn how it works (and also learn about good design and reading code), and they can finally contribute back to the open source language, learning about bug fixing, collaborative programming, documentation, testing and all the other aspects of working on a team software project.
/school.sub
Yes, this is good. I hope they can expand this to other countries as well. At least provide free – even if limited – editions to students.
The article is rather light on details. I haven’t heard too much about it from the local media (I live in SA). Would be nice to hear from a SA source.
Wasn’t this news 2 years ago when they were making the similar statement ?
when I was in high school, they presented a version of pascal for a few hours, that was it, no one really learned anything…
in university, there was c++ and java, only a few understood anything…
today, I highly doubt that any school has any reason to teach delphi/pascal when they can effectively use almost any language out there for FREE.
a few years ago, I wrote an “idealistic scenario” for delphi, where it would be free for schools, it would actively look to grow the community and make the product tangible cost wise for almost everyone out there; not sure if it would have worked or not, but today, I think it has a very small chance; it’s only focus should be in keeping it’s current customers, treat them good and try to improve the product to reduce the number of delphi products beeing rewritten in other languages such as c# and java.
Richard Baroniunas Two years ago they did announce this. South Africa used Delphi and Java and announced they were making Delphi the new, mandatory language. What happened next was that there was a full-scale revolt. A professor publicly denounced using an, outdated, commercial language rather than something popular, open source, and used in colleges. His criticisms were carried in the press and a website and many more educators signed a petition requesting to reverse the decision.
The SA education ministry put out a whitepaper justifying their decision and it was a DISASTER. I thought I still had a copy but don’t; I’ll have to dig it up again. It appeared to be written by someone who knew nothing about programming and borrowed information straight from the forums. It claimed that Delphi was very popular, particularly in America and Western Europe (ironically the two places it is least popular). It criticized unifying around Java because… brace yourselves… Java is open source, which means it might not be supported at some point and bugs won’t be fixed. JAVA. Java, the most popular programming language in the world. Java, backed by one of the biggest tech companies in the world, Oracle. That Java. It then went on to praise Embarcadero and since it was a commercial company that meant there was good support available (insert your own joke here).
Well, the protests were significant, with almost no one defending Delphi. In the end, South Africa backed down and stuck to its policy of school districts being able to choose for themselves between Delphi and Java. In its modern history, South Africa rose up to throw off two things… aparteid and Delphi. 🙁
Now Idera’s plan to get “back into education” turns out to be nothing but inventing a new “award” to give South Africa, along with giving them Delphi for free, to get them to try to force Delphi on school districts yet again.
Stay tuned… I’m sure the protests will return; I doubt this is a done deal yet.
Dorin Duminica Well said. It’s more than just that they can have any language for free though. Another problem is that Delphi is locked into running on Windows. Maybe young people (and some schools) today are running no OS X (Macbooks being very popular) or Linux. Now you’ve got two problems. The student can’t work on code at home unless they’re given free copies for home too. And even if they are, they might not run Windows.
There is also the fact that education today tends to be a big advocate of open source. In academia, knowledge is distributed for all to see; today it’s considered that publishing your idea isn’t enough if others don’t have/can’t afford the proprietary software to replicate your work. One also can’t see the source code to verify that proprietary product works correctly (big issue with math software).
Education and open source advocate John “Maddog” Hall gives talks in which he points out that open source software teaches kids three times: first, by letting them learn to program, second, they can look inside the code at the compiler and learn how it works (and also learn about good design and reading code), and they can finally contribute back to the open source language, learning about bug fixing, collaborative programming, documentation, testing and all the other aspects of working on a team software project.