It's a commercial product. Why on earth would you teach the kids something that they won't be able to use afterwards, when there are plenty of alternatives without that constraint?
It's like teaching kids to use Office, without even having the ubiquity argument.
> It's about the logic, not so much about the syntax.
So... Why Delphi then? And yes, many people do have a habit of sticking to exactly the environment that they were taught in. Defaults matter.
> And the office comparison is not valid, knowing Office is for many a very valuable skill.
As I mentioned in the other half of that paragraph, yes, you can make an argument for Office being valuable because of its ubiquity.
But that's a circular argument. Office is ubiquitous because they managed to convince educators, and now that seems to have made it basically impossible to kill off.
Trying to bootstrap something similar for Delphi is inexcusable.
But as educational tooling is that not a fault in itself? Surely we should be preparing students to at least use some mainstream languages, rather than pouring their skills and time into something that has a niche market value?
I think there's actually an argument for teaching students in something that isn't widely used/usable, as this (a) gives them the fundamentals but (b) essentially forces them to learn other more useful languages on their own.
As someone who had to use Eiffel, of all things, in college, I may be biased in this :)
IMO this is a limited view on what students need to learn to be valuable on the market. Delphi teaches you the value of experimentation through small feedback loops. For novices that just start programming this is critically important.
Absolutely, I don't entirely know what would be the best thing for students. In the end students should be taught to disrupt the industries they join not propel mainstream practices. So there is something to teaching them with more niche languages, that help them think differently to what is currently on the market! Thanks for sharing.
