4 ms·
I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows. Database class i had to learn in
by arianvanp 11mo ago
I studied at Utrecht University and all the programming classes in the Bachelor were C#, Visual Studio, XNA, DirectX. Windows. Database class i had to learn in Proprietary Microsoft tools too. All Microsoft stuff. Sure nobody would complain if you did stuff on Linux but all the support by TAs and teachers was on Microsoft platforms only.. The Master was much better but the Bachelor basically was grooming people to become Microsoft consultants.
If the rot starts at the core of your education curriculum there is no saving your dependence on Microsoft.
I always found this choice puzzling to teach people proprietary technologies in a public institution. This was before DotNet core and VSCode was a thing and Microsoft hadnt whitewashed themselves to look like an open source friendly brand yet.
- philipp-gayret 11mo agoI had a similar experience at a different university in NL, practically the entire curriculum was Oracle & Cisco.
- pbreit 11mo agoI've gone without Microsoft products for many years now. It's SOOOOO much better.
- Razengan 11mo agoI went for a decade without using any Microsoft products until they bought GitHub
- pbreit 11mo agoAh, GitHub, you're right. And I guess I do use LinkedIn and VSCode as well. Was thinking Office/Windows.
- xcf_seetan 11mo agoI ditch Windows in 1996 and went Linux. Really SOOOOO much better. :D
- drooopy 11mo agoYou'd have to pay me to use windows and office, which is exactly what's been happening at work, essentially.
- vanschelven 11mo agoSurely not _all_ the courses... Utrecht was and is big on Haskell as you know... Given that you TA'd a course on it :)
- arianvanp 11mo agoWell I guess at the time large part of GHC development technically was Microsoft Research ;) . But yeh the Functional Programming and Compilers course were nice exceptions to the Microsoft trend. That's also why I ended up following that path in my master's programme :')
- dmos62 11mo agoAnd same goes for less technical disciplines too. Adobe, Autodesk, Archicad, etc. It's pretty bad software: expensive, very buggy, poor extensibility, poorly maintained, closed-source, rapid tech debt accumulation requires upgrading your pc every few years. If only a minor percentage of organizations licensing it would instead spend that budget financing an open source project, that would have a very positive effect for everyone. I can somewhat understand private businesses not thinking long-term, but public institutions paying licensing fees instead of financing open-source seems like plain incompetence. Then again, maybe there's a lack of open-source initiatives willing to spearhead this.
- tokioyoyo 11mo agoBut if students learn some open-source software that doesn’t get used in private industry, will they be able to land a job that’s asking Autodesk et al. knowledge as a requirement?
- dmos62 11mo agoLook at Blender. No reason why that success can't be repeated.
- mensetmanusman 11mo agoYes there is, blender has a unique win/win/win that justifies funding by these major software organizations.
- dmos62 10mo agoWhat makes it unique?
- arianvanp 11mo agoIt's not the job of a university to prepare you for the workplace. That's the job of the workplace. I'm sick of industry outsourcing their jobs to public institutions. It's the job of a university to teach cutting edge research
- NedF 11mo ago[dead]
- edolstra 11mo agoIt wasn't always that way. When I began studying CS at Utrecht University, there was no Windows at all. It was Solaris, IRIX and a bit of HP-UX.
- arianvanp 11mo agoAnd it should've been NixOS after! It did slowly sneak in over time I guess. In my last year of my master's eventually the faculty was forced to stop hosting its own intranet and mailing lists and migrate everything to the "cloud" (Microsoft 365 and Blackboard). I have a copy at home of all the old wiki content and the old cs.uu.nl website. The university themselves didn't even think they should archive it so I archived it myself. I hope there's other people with copies too. My archive isn't complete
- tester756 11mo agoVisual Studio is world class IDE, C# is one of the better designed languages and ecosystems, Windows is everywhere - from home, to enterprise.
- taurath 11mo agoLooks like your education was well received if you went to those uni's!
- tester756 11mo agoI didnt!
- mejutoco 11mo agoX is great; Y is great; Z is everywhere! Probably not intended, but had to laugh a bit at that.
- tester756 11mo agoI meant people often complain that unis do not teach them things that are useful in "real world" Windows indeed is real world.
- greatgib 11mo agoVisual studio code sucks badly, just most common developers started with it and are used to it in the same way that Windows was "the os" for the same kind of developers at a specific point in the past. It is even worse know that vscode and all the clones are packed with llm agents that such devs can't live without. For one thing for example, the latency of the editor is crazy for someone that worked with native editors.
- theLiminator 11mo agoThe things that's puzzling is that I overall find it much harder getting my toolchains and stuff working on windows. In my experience, getting the periphery stuff is harder than the contents of the course a good chunk of the time for beginners.
- makeitdouble 11mo ago> if the rot starts at the core of your education curriculum there is no saving your dependence on Microsoft. TBF, the curriculum being MS based can mean very little if the concepts taught in are valuable enough. I've briefly looked at the project linked in your user description, and they don't look nice and absolutely not tinted by MS influence. It is indeed dancing with the devil, but if MS forks the money to renew the whole university's computer park, clear all the licensing issues and train part of the staff, it can be a boon for the university. My uni had a deal with Sun (RIP), many basic courses were in Java, all our system programming course we're Solaris targeted, all servers were Solaris anyway so our code had to run there. It's a pretty basic arrangement IMHO.
- AniseAbyss 11mo ago[dead]