Carleton University

http://www.carleton.ca

Based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Carleton is one of the leading computer science universities in Canada. It still is one of the major object-oriented programs in the world. It was, in fact, the first university in North America to adopt the SmalltalkLanguage and ObjectOrientedProgramming. It did so in the early 80's. (But, see discussion below...)

The School of Computer Science lives at http://www.scs.carleton.ca.

Many images of the RedScreenOfDeath burn in my mind from first year. In recent years, the RSOD has been replaced with java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError? errors and such.

Once upon a time there was a chronicle of one team's adventure in CarletonUniversitySoftwareSystemsDesign but that's been vaporized.

Unfortunately, it switched over to Java in 1998. One reason given to me was that it could not find any graduate students from other universities to place in teaching positions (hiring your own graduates leads to inbreeding and the faculty had already resorted to this practice once too often). -- rk

There was also student pressure to learn a language applicable in industry. However, as a result, the younger students are having a much harder time handling the upper year courses armed with only C++ and Java. -- SunirShah

The short-sightedness of university students is extremely sad. When I first heard about the decision, I cursed (and cursed and ...) the university president for making favours to his industry buddies. -- rk

It could be worse. We could be Waterloo. At least we get Windows machines. -- SunirShah

as I was reading this page I got this from a friend in the Carleton Labs: (2:49 AM) why the hell are these damn comps so freakin slow? -- RyanDoupe

What is wrong with Waterloo? They are not Carleton. Duh.

At least you get Windows machines? You make that sound like a good thing. I'd rather that computer science students spend their time on almost anything but Windows machines. Maybe a few windows boxes for a course on windows development would be appropriate for those people who wish that they were really at a trade school, but the rest should be kept as far away from windows as possible. I'm convinced that Windows leads to ComputerScience students being too lazy and not compelled to really learn interesting programming concepts. At my school, installing a Windows lab just led to students playing games rather than doing interesting projects.

I agree, but the school would never shell out for new iMacs.

I get the dubious distinction of being the last student to graduate with a Bachelor of Computer Science Hons. -- Theory of Computing degree. Well, in theory. -- SunirShah

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