I couldnn't agree more. Sure a CS undergrad or Masters won't make you proficient in any language but it should give a good grounding in basic constructs and generalized best practices that would be applicable in many programming languages. I do think this is one area where many cf developers could use a little extra experience.
I have learned a great deal from my masters program. It has focused on good basics in systems analysis and design etc and I still have a year left to go. I am also looking forward to the database design and network design courses. But I'm getting frustrated when I try and come back to other cf programmers at work (I have been doing cf for 10 years now myself). They have no idea what I mean when I try and discuss functional decomposition or object cohesion and coupling, or the differences between relational databases and object oriented ones for example. I know its expensive and time consuming but I still feel a good number of developers would do better if they could step back from the language and get a handle on some sound good programming concepts. Elizabeth Alger HITSS contract -----Original Message----- From: Dave Watts [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 5:09 PM To: cf-talk Subject: Re: Education > Just looking at ColdFusion alone, we've had a new major version every > year for the past 4 years. Which means that if you had a 4 year college > course that included CF prepared in 2006, it would be outdated by 3 > major versions by this year when the students graduated. I expect a > similar kind of phenomena with other languages that have been > traditionally (or recently) included in Comp-Sci courses like Java or > C++. Or for any of the .NET technologies that Microsoft promote. > > Personally I lean more in the direction of thinking that a comp-sci > degree isn't very useful in software engineering, but that a cognitive > science degree would help an awful lot. Again, computer science is not programming. A good CS curriculum isn't about specific technologies, it's about foundational knowledge - how computers work, algorithms, etc, etc. In my experience, not enough CF programmers understand that stuff as well as they should. I'm in that category myself - I've been reading CS books for the last decade or so, trying to catch up to that basic level of foundational knowledge. While a typical CS program will teach one or more programming languages, the languages themselves are tangential to the actual content of the course, and could easily be replaced by other languages. It doesn't really matter how current the actual language is, for that purpose. And as far as CF goes, while CF has lots of new bells and whistles every couple of years, the introductory CF course authored by Adobe changes very little, and is pretty similar to what it was when CF 3 came out. The advanced course changes quite a bit, on the other hand. Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software http://www.figleaf.com/ Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location. Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Want to reach the ColdFusion community with something they want? Let them know on the House of Fusion mailing lists Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:327779 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
