Microsoft’s Big Role on Campus

Washington Post covers the molding of campus curriculum by Microsoft. Any language where the IDE is not free or relatively cheap to students will stifle learning. In one of my econometrics classes at UCLA students were offered scaled down versions of Stata for $50. I do not know one person who purchased the program for use at home. The professors were bound by lab hours and available workstations and their curriculum suffered as a result. Visual Studio .Net 2003 Academic is $100 at the UCLA Store. Visual C# .Net is $60. Yes, you could have students write in Notepad, vi, or Emacs, but I have yet to it happen on a college campus.