You haven't refuted any of my points. Alex, you really need to speak to any professor outside of the PL department to get an idea just how political this chang

You haven't refuted any of my points. Alex, you really need to speak to any professor outside of the PL department to get an idea just how political this change actually is. C-naught, as jwatzman said, is not C. Students will not learn pointers, they will not learn arrays. In fact, they'll not learn any of the difficulties of C. We both know the purpose of 213 isn't to teach you C. It's coded in C, but I think I used pointers in exactly 1 lab. The course won't teach you C and you can get by with C0 knowledge. Then when you get to OS, Distributed, etc, you will need to know the intricate details of a language you have no real experience in. At this point, why teach a useless language that gives no benefits to students? It is not any easier to learn than Java, yet much less useful. Additionally, I never stated that its necessary for Java to be taught. But what I do feel is that some language that a student can use in an interview should be covered in the cirriculum. >The reality is that CMU never gave a shit about students who barely make it by The reality actually is, its impossible to make it by some of our systems courses without filling out the proper prerequisites. And currently what's happening is that the prerequisites are being removed from the cirriculum. Thus, unless people have knowledge of C, pointers, asm, people will be focusing on learning C during OS and not OS. We've both taken the course. We both know that a student who doesn't know C has a high probability of failure. The point is, a student coming out of CMU will now only be required to know 3 languages: SML, OCaml, and C-naught. One of them is utterly useless. I do believe that a focus on functional programming is a good thing. What I don't support is pushing programming languages at the cost of everything else. A systems person or even an algorithms person can't thrive in the new cirriculum. Almost every required course is a PL course, or fundamentally tied to PL in some way.