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.
And 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.
But 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?
As a former medical and scientific illustrator, learning a software package (Photoshop or GIMP) really isn't as crucial as learning principles and practices of art, design, and graphics. Color theory, negative space, composition, etc., are critical to production and apply to any media one chooses to work in: oil on canvas, pen and ink, or computers.
The other issue is access. Again, from an art/graphics/design perspective, costs associated with proprietary software can limit some students from even participating in art/graphics/design programs. Adobe Creative Suite is US$69.99/mo or US$840/yr.
It'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
Sure, you can say that. But a good chunk of people will disagree with you. I went to one of the top schools, and it was fairly 30/70 between teaching “cutting edge research” and teaching “what’s being used in practice”. I think that was fair. During bachelors, hardly you’ll get cutting edge research cause you don’t have prerequisite knowledge.
Agree with this 100%. At some point the private sector decided that it will accept no responsibilities of any kind (except for what was fought and defended tooth and nail by the civil society and a few slightly more responsible governments), and all the costs that can be avoided will be avoided, shifting the burden on the public sector.
It's not a big jump to go from open-source equivalents of the close source products. The concept and what one wants to accomplish is the same. Many of these companies have certification programs, if the point is to be specific and narrow, for a particular job.
Good points. Funding the open-source equivalents, even at a fraction of what they are spending on close-source, would have circumvented the problem of being "trapped" in the first place. Even more, the universities would be able to contribute code to the projects, if they wanted to.
It was always pretty obvious what Microsoft wanted and was trying to do. Now trying to escape, will be painful, but that's the price they will have to endure if they want freedom and data sovereignty.
I don't think it's a stretch. I've numerous close friends that work with it daily and I've helped troubleshoot some of the issues. After Effects is quite hated among them, but has to be used, because there aren't viable alternatives. Illustrator crashes randomly. Photoshop has multi-decade bugs in color handling. But, the fact that their resource use baloons yearly and thus forces the industry to waste on constant hardware upgrades would be enough to discredit Adobe software, imo.
Well 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 :')
Visual 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.
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
> 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.
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.