The Posse focuses way too much on programming languages and tools and skips over domain expertise and the importance of academics for specific software domains.
The Posse criticized universities for language choice: being slow to adopt Java and now being slow to adopt something simpler for web development. The local university and community colleges where I live absolutely offer "continuing education" type classes with this applied approach. They have Python or Rails web development classes, database classes, network admin classes, and computer graphics and video game development classes. These classes absolutely have more programming language and dev tool variety of the type you discuss. However, from an academia perspective, the premier undergraduate curriculums try to avoid the applied trade skills and teach more conceptual subjects. The CS curriculum at my local university, has at most, one class about "programming". All the other classes teach some other concept, such as algorithms or data structures or data mining or machine learning. Most of these classes involve programming, but merely as an aid to teach a concept. Secondly, the dominant programming languages used in university courses aren't the C/Java/ Python/Ruby class of languages used for general purpose production software, but the Matlab/R type languages which are intended for engineering/math/statistical prototype work. There are certain skill sets that universities excel at teaching students: math, statistics, physics, biology, signal processing, etc. The typical mundane software job doesn't need any of that at all, which is often a rude shock to graduating students. But on the flip side, sometimes those skills are absolutely necessary for particular software domains and they are very hard to learn well or teach outside the university system. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
