Pitching D to academia

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 9 March 2016 at 16:12:08 UTC, Michael wrote:
> On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 08:40:17 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
> wrote:
>> On Sunday, 6 March 2016 at 07:38:01 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
>>> Motivated by Dmitry's "Pitching D to a gang of Gophers" 
>>> thread, how about pitching it to a gang of professors and 
>>> graduate students?
>>
>> The geeky graduate students are the better target.
>>
>> In teaching you usually want a focused clean language related 
>> to the course or a language that is already adopted by 
>> industry.
>
> This hold a lot of weight speaking as a current postgraduate. I 
> find that when teaching undergraduate courses, you're very much 
> restricted to a few things. First, the choice of language to 
> teach at the beginning of a student's degree needs to be based 
> on what they will continue to use throughout their degree and 
> beyond graduating. This means that other modules with specific 
> software/library requirements will need to be taken into 
> account (no point in teaching D/Go/Rust when you require MATLAB 
> for several modules or coursework is required to be submitted 
> in C/Java in later years). So it needs to fit with other taught 
> units and that means that other members of staff who do not 
> know D (and honestly, often don't have the time to learn a new 
> language and rewrite all of the course material) will be stuck 
> teaching the students another language on top of achieving 
> their unit's aims.
>
> Second, a university needs to be able to provide sufficient 
> argument for teaching a language in relation to graduate 
> employment; If the job market demands C++/Java/Python and only 
> know D then problems arise pretty quickly and heads of 
> department are not going to approve languages in place of those 
> with high industrial demand. For most graduates, experience and 
> skills for graduate employment is key.
>
> Postgraduates, on the other hand, often have more time to 
> experiment, and due to the nature of postgraduate work 
> (particularly Ph.D and beyond) their research tends to require 
> novelty. D has proved very valuable for me during my research 
> and the lack of library requirements for experiments to be 
> written and tested means that I am not tied to using a 
> particular language. I am of course not saying that we 
> shouldn't try to encourage undergraduates to explore D, but 
> it's very difficult to try and introduce a new language into 
> the curriculum at most universities without a rather large 
> volume of support and justifications for doing so. Just some 
> thoughts.

Chuck Allison's experience is quite interesting.  I don't think 
Utah Valley University is seen as a top tier school, but enough 
of his students have received very good offers from top companies 
is enough to make one think.

http://dconf.org/2014/talks/allison.html

Of course, teaching staff at most places won't have the standing 
that Chuck Allison does to break with custom, but on the other 
hand I suppose if you stick with custom you will at best achieve 
customary results.

I do take your point about postgrads, and that's a fair 
observation too.