PUNE: There is a need for better collaboration between the academia and the industry, stressed Bjarne Stroustrup , founder of the programming language C++, in an exclusive chat with the TOI on Saturday. He said both parties can work in sync to create industry-ready professionals.

"I firmly believe in a multi-disciplinary approach during professional studies and also during the entire span of a person's career. One should be keen to take up new subjects as and when required," said he Stroustrup. "If possible, even teachers should be exposed to industry experiences every once a while."

Stroustrup was in the city to kick off the annual tech-lecture series at Persistent Systems with a talk on 'Modern C++ Style', which was watched by 3,000 students from 43 colleges and 1,800 professionals from Persistent and five other companies.

"I agree with what Bjarne Stroustrup has to say and it is essential that people from other disciplines not shy away from learning programming while computer science graduates should also not shy away from getting a hands on (experience) in other areas," said Anand Deshpande, managing director and CEO, Persistent Systems, which has recently started a Persistent Computing Institute to bridge the gap between computer education and industry needs.

Early lessons in programming could, however, be delayed. Stroustrup said, "I hear from 12-year-olds that they feel it is too late for them to have started learning programming, which is surprising. Although we live in a competitive world, but there is no need for such young children to learn programming. It may be introduced in high-school though." He had a word of advice for the teachers also, "Fundamentals and logical thinking should be taught first and then the syntax and not the other way round."

Dispelling the myth that the use of the language C++ is declining, Stroustrup said the usage is growing steadily and is used as the base language for majority of gadgets in current use. "Even the popular Java language's java virtual machine is built on top of C++. Systems which need complex or very large programs, around more than 10,000 lines of code, C++ is an ideal language for optimum performance."

"While C++14 was completed in three years and is available now, going forward, we are looking at better concurrency support and better libraries in the C++17 version," shared Stroustrup, talking on 'modern languages'.

Stroustrup stressed on the need of 'rigorous courses', when he said that "if there has to be a course in high school or one has to introduce programming in multi-displinary fashion, then the course needs to challenging, and thorough, else there it is of no use."

While he stressed on the importance of writing "maintainable, reusable and the correct code", his advise to fresh graduates was "to be thorough with fundamentals, to try and polish communication skills and try and work at what you love".

Stroustrup wrapped up speaking on the question of will everyone need to learn programming in the future. "While professionals who handle the computer infrastructure - on which everything stands need to be thorough with programming, everyone need not be a serious programmer, but may be learn a bit."

What is needed is that the academia can offer a more practical touch in the courses that are taught to students

