How To Teach Blue

Blue is not meant to be "The Final Answer" to all programming languages. Blue is a teaching language.

Different languages are appropriate for different situations, and Blue is certainly not one for real-world industrial projects (not because the language is not nice or powerful, but mainly because of lack of efficiency). This means that we do not intend that our students leave the university with Blue as their only language. We recognise the need to serve industry needs and to teach ugly things like C++.

We are, however, convinced that a student with one year experience in Blue and one year in C++ will be a better C++ programmer than a student with two years C++ experience.

Blue is designed in a way that all the concepts learned in Blue are relevant to other mainstream object-oriented languages such as Eiffel, Ada, C++, ObjectPascal, etc., and that transition to one of those languages is easy. We see a curriculum using Blue as one where Blue is taught for one year, teaching all the important concepts in a clear way, and a second year in a "real-world" language where students learn all the necessary nasty stuff.