CS degree from pitt.edu 1996 and C was not required. But a friend an I took it a...

k__ · on May 10, 2016

We had to do the exercises of "Software Development 1" in C also I had 2 years C in high school. But it was only basic stuff.

Most of university was Java and "use what you want", only a bit C++ for "Computer Graphics 2" (which I never did)

I found it a bit sad, but on the other hand I never needed it.

deaddodo · on May 10, 2016

Wow. I started at a community college and they had two tracts for an Associate's in CS: Java and C++. Whichever you opted for, you took one class in C to get started; then 3 semesters of each language. You also had to take an assembler class or data structures and algorithms.

Transferred that to a UC and we definitely touched more ASM and C in the OS courses.

aianus · on May 10, 2016

If not C, what did they have you use for systems programming? Like, in your Operating Systems course?

steveklabnik · on May 10, 2016

Pitt grad here, though a decade after the OP. Pitt has 3 courses related to this stuff:

  * CS 447: http://cs.pitt.edu/schedule/courses/view/447
  * CS 449: http://cs.pitt.edu/schedule/courses/view/449
  * CS 1550: http://cs.pitt.edu/schedule/courses/1550

447 and 449 are required, 1550 is optional.

447 is almost entirely MIPS assembly, and goes into hardware architecture as well https://people.cs.pitt.edu/~childers/CS0447/

449 is a C class, using K&R 2nd edition: https://people.cs.pitt.edu/~jmisurda/teaching/cs449/2164/cs0...

1550 is more specifically about operating systems, using Tanenbaum's book: https://people.cs.pitt.edu/~jmisurda/teaching/cs1550/2164/cs...

So at least today, there's one class that's all C stuff. Almost all of the rest was Java, while I was a student.

projektfu · on May 10, 2016

I went to Pitt from 1996-2000. In the first OS course, we did have some programming assignments in C, but it wasn't a good course and the assignments were mostly just using the Windows API. In the second OS course, the professor and his student had been working on an operating system simulator in Java (DORITOS, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=736855...) and it was used to teach real-time systems programming without needing to get down to real hardware.

andrewfromx · on May 10, 2016

Turbo Pascal! I wrote this whole this to simulate file system inodes in pascal. We also did ADA and Smalltalk. But the main lang for everything back in my day was Pascal. Java was just starting when I was leaving.