Didi
1. FYI - Jet is totally separate from the Access developer - you can ship and distribute a Jet runtime (which is a bunch of DLL's basically) free of charge for any Windows o/s
2. imho - Access Basic can be part of a 1 trimester course on programming languages which should cover a number of modern languages - like php, java, javascript, Lisp (not scheme)
I believe that being exposed to a spectrum of modern widely used programming languages is an important part of a CS education although not an end in itself.
3. Having said that, I have worked in industry for a long time and I can tell you that perhaps with the exception of Bar Ilan; most of the CS grads I interviewed had pathetically
poor programming skills. There is a very sad tendency at the Technion and TAU to focus on CS-theoretic curricula and not on problem-solving.
danny
Yedidyah Bar-David wrote:
On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 09:55:13AM +0200, Danny Lieberman wrote:
Tazahi
I've been following this thread and I wanted to shed a different light:
I'm not a Microsoft advocate but lets get the facts straight:
a. MS Access developer is free in Office
Not exactly. It is built into Office Pro, but not in all Office bundles.
b. The Academic licenses for Office are about 30% of the commercial MOLP which is about 20% of the single unit list price - so it costs peanuts for the Technion to develop in MS Access
I agree it should not cost much. But they might have other considerations/needs.
c. MS Access runtime (Jet) is free for unlimited distribution
Jet, as far as I understand, isn't the "runtime" of MS Access. Actually, there is not such a separation between Runtime and Development time, in Access. You can't ship an executable+runtime. Jet, as far as I understand, is the runtime of Access's Database, that is, it's the code you need to read/write mdb files. So if the app is Access-based, you need Access. If it's e.g. written in VB, and only needs to rw mdb files, you can distribute it without limitations (plus Jet and VB runtime).
d. You can use PHP on a Windows server to access the MDB database by ODBC since there is no limitation to using an MDB in a runtime server
Indeed, but that does not help you if the app is Access. If you only need a DB, mdb might (or might not) be an acceptable choice. But he talked about Access is a development platform. If mdb is all you need, there are a few other small DBs. I played a bit with SQLite and liked it. I am not sure it does everything Jet does, but it's probably good enough for most such small projects.
Second of all, with all due respect - this sort of smacks of "i'll bite off my nose to spite my face" (We dont use Access because ... )
MS Access is a widely used tool,and when your students go out looking for work they'll have a much better shot at a job with Access than with Ruby.
Think of it like this - it's a tool and engineering schools like the Technion are supposed to teach you to find & use tools. If the best tool for this job is a pocket knife thats the tool
I would expect a Technion grad to use.
Although I am from a CS school, which isn't exactly engineering, we do have here some discussions about what is our mission and what we should teach. Clearly we can't (and don't want to) teach only theoretic stuff. But I am also not sure we should choose our languages/platforms _only_ based on popularity and on increasing the number of relevant lines in our students' resume. If someone wants to program Access they do not need to spend 3 whole years here (or 4 in the Technion).
Maybe Ruby isn't known enough. I am pretty sure, though, that PHP will serve them very well when looking for jobs. It's also probably more work than Access, so I understand Tzahi's request.
To comment on Tzahi's original questions - I have no real experience
with any of this, but I did see in the past some relevant projects based
on PHP. Search freshmeat. Examples: bforms, bif, browse_edit, dblib,
eleven, phpbuns, phpcodegenie, php_gen, phplabware, phplus, prado,
webgen, yawp. They are from my .whatsnewfm.db.hot, in alphabetical order
:-) I never used any of them.
-- Danny Lieberman Visit us at http://www.software.co.il Office + 972 8 970-1485 Cell + 972 54 447-1114
================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
