[yuliang]

Hi,

I am sure plenty of people in the developer forum are IT/ComputerScience majors. What's the general attitude toward your Mac-ness at your school or work environment?

[type_r503]

I am a recent graduate, and most people were against macs. This is even after their MS bashing and saying windows sucks. There were very few mac users and nobody I hung around.

They would all complain about one-button mice or the differences between the UI.

[skipjack]

I took my first classes at my present school this summer. I still haven't found the Mac lab, which is supposed to have some 8500 machines running OS 8.6. So far, the instructors (the Department Head who taught Intro to programming/C++ and the UNIX instructor) seemed neutral. At least the UNIX instructor had some familiarity with OS X, but had to refer all Mac questions to "one of the system administrators who has a Ti book". Most students use the university network for assignments, and its servers are Sun machines. (It looks like Sun gave some sort of grant to set up a lab of workstations.)

At the community college, one of the math and science instructors uses a Mac for his personal machine, but tries to use cross platform software. Some of his favorites (Graphing Calculator, Digital Magic, SPIM/SAL, and SysQuake) don't have an OS X version coming, but they still run in Classic. The library computer lab has about 1/3 Macs and 1/3 other (it looked more like half and half a year ago), but all the classroom machines are PCs, including new laptops (which are not configured for wireless connectivity). Most other instructors are PC centric.

Note: Digital Magic is a program for simulating digital circuits written by students at UC Davis. SPIM/SAL is a nice version of SPIM which I prefer to the UNIX version. SysQuake is a MATLab-like program which uses the same commands and is available free in an educational version. (SysQuake is cross platform. Digital Magic is not. SPIM/SAL is a Mac specific version of SPIM.)

[zorn]

I'm a soon to be graduating student from Drexel University. I was formerly a comp sci major but changed it to Digital Media .. although I still love to program, getting Cocoa under my belt right now ..

My school was very Mac back in the day, every student had to own one since 1984. bout 95/96 that started to change and windows slowing crept it's way in and now dominated the univ.

CS students still have a few Sun boxes and in the art dept we use mostly Macs (a few dells for 3d studio max -- although I think they are seriously looking @ Maya and OS X)

Programming wise it can vary from prof to prof .. i had one who demanded our code compile on VC++ while the other said it just had to be ANSI (which OS X is via the GNU C compiler).

any more Qs feel free.

[speirsfr]

I'm a PhD student in CS at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Our department is officially platform agnostic which is great. I have a G4 with OS X on my desk, and an iBook. The IT head is a huge Mac fan, all our secretarial staff use iMacs. We're looking at the Xserve as a replacement for our current servers when their time comes (we're going rackmount for space reasons).

Our teaching is done on NT in levels 1 and 2, Linux in 3 and Linux/NT in 4. I understand why support like windows for the early years, since you can remove so much of the default install that it's impossible to break anything. Mind you, it's also tricky to get meaningful non-course work done on such a stripped box :-)

I should say that all my comments are my own opinion and don't represent anything about what GU-CS has/will/wants to do.

[juanvaldes]

Actually my school is quite balanced. Two are very pro widows. One demanded that I hand in homework on floppys and VS would still break stuff between my system, the load system (using VS) and his. Of course without explination I would get a "F" for that assignment! The other windows guy teaches the GUI class which I have not taken, but I hear you are not allowed to sub in any other platform for windows but I will still try...

The older two couldnt' give a ****. They need to retire and can't effictivly use any systems (alwasy very entertaining during class seeing the prof fight with windows) so they are cool and alwasy forget I'm using a mac.

The last two profs are the cool younger ones. One actually has a iBook and is "the mac guy" for this reason. The other dosen't but is very understanding and open to other platforms and is fighting to get SOMETHING besides "only windows" into our labs and students hands.

So, I have found 1 other mac user who like most CS geeks is very anti social. Another who uses macs at home but has no tools so does everthing in the lab and then myself and cheerios. Pretty standard I bet...

[Detrius]

I'm at UNC Charlotte. The computer science department here tends to be rather platform neautral, and in fact slightly UNIX biased. They run solaris on most of their machines. The classes that use some sort of GUI all give references for coding on the X Windowing System. Therefore, no matter what machine you are running, you can install some version of Linux on it and do your school work. Of course... OS X is killer for this, but they haven't adopted it yet. There are not many Mac users. In fact, most people I've interacted with tend to run Linux.

[Apocalypse]

I go to the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario).

I am a CS major which puts me in the Faculty of Math. Math at UW is great (in fact it is one of the only schools in the world that has a math faculty)! The first year stuff is Windows or Mac OS 9 which the second year stuff is all Solaris. I think that some specific courses in fourth year are Irix and Linux but for the most part it is Solaris. In first year, I was one of two Mac users who started in the highest entry class. Now that OS X is out and the iBook is economical (not to mention Airport cards being cheaper and better than stock 802.11 PC cards which we use on the Math wireless network) I am one of 3 Mac guys that I regularly hang-out with (thus, not including people I don't talk to which includes the other guy I mentioned).

With OS X, being a Mac user on campus has become something you can be proud of. Also, considering that Microsoft just bought exclusive rights to tampering with the curriculum of the Engineering faculty, anti-MS feeling has never been higher. this helps bring all the *nix users closer together to defend the freedom of our education.


As for coding for class, compile it on OS X and then double-check one Solaris right before submission (since you have to copy things to your account on the Solaris machines to submit, anyway). The only problems I get are with STL versions (vector doesn't have the [] operator on the school's systems but it does under OS X (?)) and GCC versions (they are now using GCC 3) which should be completely resolved by the GCC 3.1 ABI provided in Jaguar and I bet that Solaris 8 will fix the STL version problems.


In all, I recommend UW for CS. Just don't go there for Engineering (unless you want C# to be a CORE REQUIREMENT of your degree).

Jeff.

[davechen]

Originally posted by Detrius:
I'm at UNC Charlotte.

Hey, I know one of the profs in UNC-C's CS department, KR Subramanian. He spent a couple summers with us collaborating on research.

Regarding Macs, when I was in grad school at UNC-Chapel Hill, most programming was done on Unix systems, and then there were some Macs around for desktop publishing. By the time I left, more people were doing things on PC's, although coursework was still done on Unix machines. These days it's a mix of Unix, Windows and Linux. With OS X, Mac's are drawing more interest, though.

[Detrius]

I definately know KRS. His intro to computer graphics class a few years back introduced me to real computer programming (as opposed to dinky little one day projects).

I talked to him about my senior project that I'm currently working on, but he wasn't interested. He does different stuff.

Speaking of senior projects... when (not if) I get this thing running, the Mac will have an exclusive Image Based Modeler. Hell yeah! Now that I'm finally up to speed with Cocoa, development is flying!!

[sadie]

I went to Exeter in the UK. There's a big split there between the CS people who are largely Unix, and the campus IT Services who want to homogenize on Windows. On virtually every campus IT issue - firewalls, cabling, DHCP - they fight tooth and nail. The CS department has a lot of clout, because they run half the major servers.

The attitude of both of them to the Mac was pretty much "huh? is that still around?", although CS softened when I told them it was unix. I did my final project on a Mac, but since it was a command line tool they insisted that I made sure it ran happily on Solaris as well. I also wrote it in Objective-C, which made them a little unhappy.