Comment by rbanffy
3 days ago
The goal of college is not to prepare you to join the workforce - it's to make you learn the concepts under the code you'll read or write when working in the industry. In that, forced constraints are useful.
I learned APL while most of my colleagues were angry for not learning C (or xBase, which was immediately applicable). Had the teacher chosen the commercially appealing option, those students would have never seen how different from the Pascal and Fortran they learned before could be, how conciseness was powerful, and how arrays being first-class citizens made sense.
To this day, I'm frustrated by Excel's (and almost no other spreadsheet's) inability to have a cell containing anything other than a scalar.
When people ask me which language they should learn next, I always suggest something different from what they already know. APL is interesting, Haskell, Lisp, Smalltalk, and FORTH are the ones I like to point people to. Ruby is also interesting - it'll shatter a lot of your certainties about syntax and how syntax should behave.
As for Excel, I have news for you:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/excelblog/excel-now...
I agree that the role is to learn concepts and such, however there is a big difference in how far from the industry some teachers are.
Thankfully I was also blessed both during my high school apprenticeship, and engineering degree, to enjoy a multitude of programming languages and environments, in similar vein to what you describe.
However, and that was the point I was making, there is a difference between being stuck in the old ways, when the professors themselves learnt them as students, and what are common practices using the programming language in modern times.