The programming language market (was Re: [Haskell-cafe] Why functional programming matters

[Henning Thielemann]

On Sun, 27 Jan 2008, Tim Chevalier wrote:

> On 1/27/08, Dipankar Ray <dipankar at jfet.net> wrote:
> >
> > 3) most of the canonical US universities for CS (MIT, Berkeley, Stanford,
> > CMU, etc) basically don't teach haskell or ML, or even talk much about it,
> > relative to how much they talk about, say, Java.
> >
> > It's one thing that companies don't move forward; yet another thing that
> > Universities don't either. Why is that? Why, in 2008, is Java taught more
> > than Haskell?
> >
>
> There's really only one reason for this: at least in the United
> States, universities are becoming more and more like businesses, and
> faculty feel they have to give students what they want in order to
> "compete". Computer science undergrads, as a whole, want to learn Java
> or C++ "so they can learn something that'll be useful and help them
> get a job."

Same here in Germany. Universities become controlled by industry leaders
(see "Hochschulfreiheitsgesetz") thanks to Bertelsmann et.al., and
universities are considered as producers of programmers for industry. With
this reasoning we offered an introduction to C for math students.