On Wed, 2012-05-23 at 19:56 -0300, Ricky Clarkson wrote: > My experience in a UK university was that the lecturers taught whatever > they were good at unless they were useless in which case something was > chosen for them and they had to learn it to teach it.
Sort of. > Most of them came from a maths department that got closed down but they had > no computer science background. Instead of teaching some mathematical > areas of computer science they often just picked a programming language, > started teaching it, and learned it in that order. Now I wonder if we are in distinct parallel universes. > I later worked alongside them as a lecturer and researcher for some years > and couldn't get any sensible words out of them when I suggested that we > should be teaching some form of lambda (closure, anonymous function) if not > lambda calculus itself. CS in the UK will probably remain a code monkey > training course, and not a very good one at that. I have no idea which UK university you were working in, but this experience bears almost no relationship to mine of the ones I used to work in and was associated with by being external examiner. > On the engineering side, no VCS was covered or even available, unit testing > was unheard of and the computers were set up against the programmer; you > could not run anything that listened on a port and it was hard to get at > cmd. Linux was later added but without Java or sufficient personal space > to add it to your home directory. I know that using RCS hardly counts as a VCS but we had the students using it in the mid to late 1980s. Then moved to CVS as soon as we could, then Subversion. I have no direct university experience in the last few years but all the folks I know still surviving in the system (*) report Git and Mercurial in very wide use. > Laptops were forbidden because laptop users would disconnect network cables > and the computer science students wouldn't know what to do despite having a > module in which among other items they would learn to attach the plastic > connectors to network cables. Now I really worry. Which university is it of which you talk... -- Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:russel.win...@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: rus...@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder
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