Proper Community Engagement

I'd hope their mission is to teach students the fundamentals that will make them effective at learning all the other technologies they'll need to use over their career, many of which haven't been invented yet, rather than training them in one specific language.

(The first language taught at my university was ML, specifically because it demonstrated the fundamentals of computation without all the distractions that C/Java/etc introduce, and because (being a practically useless language) it was unlikely any students had prior experience with it and everyone would start from a similar level. Then they taught maybe five other languages to varying extents, some more practical and some less.)

> There are literally hundreds of job postings for Rust while there are thousands for Go, or C, or Java, etc. (Indeed claims 400 currently. LinkedIn lists 300. Actual data.)

LinkedIn tells me there are 3000+ jobs for "Rust software engineer" in the US, so I'm not sure where you're getting 300 from. Certainly it's more niche than many other languages, but from an employability perspective it's not an extreme niche like e.g. Zig (4 jobs on LinkedIn).

For serious (non-blockchain) tech companies, Amazon alone has 173 job adverts that mention Rust - sometimes explicitly requiring Rust experience, though mostly asking for e.g. "Experience programming with at least one modern language such as Python, Ruby, Golang, Java, C++, C#, Rust". Knowing any of those will put you in a good position to learn the specific languages you need for the job. Microsoft has 97 mentioning Rust, e.g. "4+ years of experience with coding in one of C#, Python, Go, Rust, Java, C or C++", or "Knowledge/experience programming in RUST or other memory safe languages is highly desirable".

Google rarely mentions Rust in job adverts, but they've said over 1000 Google developers committed Rust code in 2022 and over 500 took a Google-developed training course. So I think that doesn't indicate they don't believe Rust experience is valuable, just that it's rare enough they don't bother calling it out in job ads, and they believe it's worthwhile to invest in training developers for their Rust-based projects, which could be seen as even stronger support than asking for prior experience.

And yet there are even more jobs that require JavaScript. Let's rewrite the kernel as a NodeJS module.

Rust will never be as popular as Go or Java, simply because it's not the best language for regular server-side applications.

And this comment embodies everything I think is WRONG with the current education system. That attitude belongs with the UK polytechnics of old, not what Universities are SUPPOSED to be for. Not blaming Universities, it's the politicians who are desperate to see everybody educated, when maybe the majority of people are incapable of benefiting from education!

What the parent has just described is what I would describe as TRAINING, not Education, and that does not belong in a traditional University. That's what Polytechnics did - they prepared people for the world of work, they trained them, and that's fine.

Going back to a study I came across, apparently the ability to think *logically* is acquired at about age 14, and maybe half of all people never acquire the ability. Yet education - higher education certainly - is all about logical thought! So why on earth are the politicians (I think this is the UK Conservatives pre Tony Blair, so that dates it) desperate to send half the population to Uni? It's coming home to bite them now, as a lot of people see Uni as loading them up with debt to acquire worthless qualifications. And for so many, that actually is the case.

Uni should be for education. Uni should be for teaching people how to use their brains. To quote a lady from years back on Radio 4 - "I didn't send my son to school to do Domestic Science so he could cook. I sent him to school to learn Latin so he knew how to read a recipe book and follow instructions". Too many people think education is doing Domestic Sci. IT ISN'T. THAT'S TRAINING. Education is learning Latin and Maths, so you can get a career as a programmer (like I did).

Cheers,
Wol

Thinking in terms of "(un)employable languages" is entirely the wrong way of thinking. Any CS graduate worth their salt is able to quickly pick up a new language and transfer the concepts they are familiar with -- that is what truly makes them employable.