Quote:
A few years ago one of my uncles landed a job because he knew COBOL.

As weird as it sounds, I have actually downloaded some COBOL stuff that sits on my computer and I'm tempted to start learning COBOL. I think there was a COBOL course in my school, but they dropped it a little while before I entered. In a few years there will be a shortage in COBOL programmers, and the amount of programs that need to be maintained is enormous. Of course, maintaining COBOL programs isn't exactly my ideal future job, but if it pays well it's good to have some extra weapons in your arsenal.

If you're interested in good Computer Science universities in Texas, I will have to recommend to you the University of North Texas. They are mainly focused around C++, and they have one of the oldest game programming labs in the nation.
I graduated from there a few years ago, and I'm finding that most of the people that have gone to college at other universities didn't recieve the proper exposure to actual programming while attending. That was very surprising to me at first, but now I'm finding it to be pretty common with recent graduates.
What I hear about UTD is that they're currently moving their main focus towards Java.
The site for the game programming lab is:
http://larc.csci.unt.edu

In general I'd say its much better to be taught "old" languages and to leave learning newer languages as an excercise for the student. The reason, in part, is that most new languages are usually designed te be cross-platform or RAD languages (like java or C#) and tend to have features that, while usefull to that end, tend to 'baby' new programmers. One example is that it is substantially easier for someone with a C/C++ background to get used to java/C# garbage collection rather than the other way around. Those who have always had a garbage collecter are likely to know little or nothing about manual memory management techniques, pooled allocators, or the cost at which their nice garbage collection system comes. Also, newer languages like Java/C# are poor choices for teaching you anything about the underlying hardware and its relationship to programming languages. A language like C, for instance, is really only one step above assembly language (while still being a very readable language), whereas java or c# is another 2-3 steps further away from the hardware.

Remember, you're studying computer science, not just programming. Computer Science is, oddly enough, the Science of Computers and Computation. Many people make the mistake that its purpose is to teach you to be a programmer. Programming is only one artifact of a much broader understanding you wish to command. If you only wish to program, I'm sure there's a devry that can accomodate you, however you'd never be as good of a programmer than had you taken a full traditional CS program.

There is a good spectrum of languages you list at A&M that will broaden your horizons as a programmer or aid you in studying particular disciplines of programming (such as lisp for AI or fortran for scientific computing.) I'm actually a little disapointed to not see any functional programming languages (like ML or haskel) listed though.

As to how easy it is to pick up some of these newer language. In my last job I was able to be productive with C# on my second day, having never coded a single line of C# before and my backgound being primarily C/C++. VB.net, java/&#106avascript, and SQL were similarly easy to pick up.

Quote:Original post by mikeman

Quote:
A few years ago one of my uncles landed a job because he knew COBOL.

As weird as it sounds, I have actually downloaded some COBOL stuff that sits on my computer and I'm tempted to start learning COBOL. I think there was a COBOL course in my school, but they dropped it a little while before I entered. In a few years there will be a shortage in COBOL programmers, and the amount of programs that need to be maintained is enormous. Of course, maintaining COBOL programs isn't exactly my ideal future job, but if it pays well it's good to have some extra weapons in your arsenal.

I studied it for a bit back in 1992. It sucks compared to other languages.

That is an interesting mix of languages to be exposed to, though I wonder what flavour of Pascal they're teaching -- modern Delphi style maybe? If so, I don't mind it (er, the object pascal that Borland pushes), though I will admit that I am more comfortable with C++/C#/Java.

Either way, like everyone's said -- it's not the languages that are important, but the understanding of what happens internally -- of course, that's no good to you if you don't have time/motivation to self-learn different languages...but if you don't have that motivation, consider another career track because anyone that programs will tell you that self-improvement (via continuous education) is just a part of our lives :)

~Shiny