Salford, but I've gathered that this is not actually atypical. On May 24, 2012 7:31 AM, "Russel Winder" <rus...@winder.org.uk> wrote:
> 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 > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
