"Nobody programs in machine language" (was: Modern

I am not convinced at all that univesity courses should necessarily teach the skills needed for today's computing (or anything else for that matter -- and noticed I didn't say they they should not teach said skills, only that they may not). Rather they should teach the fundamentals, so that the latest-n-greatest can be understood, etc. What's currently used in the real world changes with time. The fundamentals rarely do. They increase, more stuff gets added, and yes, sometimes accepted stuff gets shown to be wrong, but I would argue that, say, recursion is the same in any language, and it doesn't really matter which language you used to learn it. Alas amployers don't seem to understand this. They'd rather have somebody who's been on a 2 week course to learn <foo> (where <foo> is the latest language/OS/FPGA/...) than somebody who'd had 30 years in the game but who's never actually seen <foo>. Of course the latter could learn <foo> in a couple of days given the manuals/databooks, and would then probably be able to do more with it. Alas they have to get funding, and at least in the UK that's the only way they'll get it. I am not happy about this either. I would agree. While there is probably little point in teaching how to make logic gates using valves (although, actually, the Eccles-Jordan flip-flop is much the same whether you use valves, transistors, FETs, relays, whatever..), there is a lot of point in seeing at least one complete (and simple) processor at gate level. There's probably equal point (although I'll admit I've never done this) in seeing how a compiler or interpretter for a simple programming language is constructed. Fortran I believe. -tony