As you might be aware from my previous blogs I am very keen on providing high quality architectural training and qualifications as part of generating a true architectural profession. To this end I had a meeting with the head of computer science at a British university the other day to discuss architectural courses and examinations. During the discussions the important topic of what language the university should be teaching came up and the head of the department pointed out some interesting facts to me.

 

Firstly UK universities will be allowed to charge a “top up” fee of £3000 (about $6000 with the way the exchange rate is at the moment J) per student per year starting in 2006. This means that universities now have to be much more interested in marketing themselves to future students. At the same time most university courses have been around for 5 or 6 years and so are beginning to look a bit long in the tooth. Because of this university computer science departments are looking to refresh their courses so that in 2006 they will have a new and up to date offering.

 

So universities will generate the new courses over the next 2 years ready for the 2006 intake of students who will then graduate 4 years later in 2010. This course will have a 5 year life span, until say 2015, which is a very long way away in computing terms.

 

The question the head had for me was what language should the university be teaching in the new course which would still be valid and relevant in 2015.

I have to say I struggled with this. I don’t like to think that people will still think that Java or even C# is still cool and leading edge in 2015. I realise that Cobol and Fortran are still around 40 years after they were new but one could hardly call them hip and happening languages which are be attractive to students.

 

I sort of think that AOP or DSL’s would be the kind of thing that students would find interesting and useful in 2015 but they are a bit too new to write a course in them at the moment. I also think that perhaps we should be teaching a more meta level language; or indeed just accept that C# will look very dated by then and that it’s the concepts but not the language that is important.

 

Anyway the conclusion I came to is that I don’t know. Does anyone have any ideas what will be cool in 2015? How should computer science be taught in 10 years time, will we even be teaching CS then?