Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Tracy R Reed wrote:
This ties in with our study of SICP. I tend to agree with the author.
I don't have a CS degree either but I am educating myself and I am
more or less familiar with the concepts that are mentioned that a lot
of CS grads don't have these days. I have seen several articles like
these lately:
http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/CrossTalk/2008/01/0801DewarSchonberg.html
Any article that attempts to defend C++ (independent of C) as a
pedagogical language loses all credibility with me. Sorry.
Well, at least you aren't being cavalier about it. ;-)
There are quite a few languages that do everything C++ can do, and
they do it much better.
All evidence to the contrary aside....
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html
I know they specifically point the finger at Java but I don't think
they are really saying Java is the problem. It is the decisions of
school administrators and their fear of losing all of their
enrollment because programming is just too hard that is the problem.
It seems like industry is starting to put some pressure back on the
schools to stop the dumbing-down process and start making real
software engineers (and we all know we use "engineer" in a rather
loose sense here since engineering is science and programming still
too much art) again.
First, you make an implicit assumption that it is the duty of *only*
the school to generate what industry needs.
Excuse me, but it is not. Industry is supposed to *train* its
workers. Remember that? Yeah, I know, it's been a while since a
corporation has done that.
Society has evolved to the point where knowledge workers are expected to
have a degree, which means they enter industry later. This has shifted
the risk of training/developing the raw skills of workers more to the
individual. As such, it isn't unreasonable to expect individuals who
graduate with a CS degree to have the kind of raw skills needed by the
industry as a whole, with the responsibility of training people for a
specific job still being left to employers (although some want even more
than that, and suffer accordingly). Particularly given that so many CS
programs *don't* prepare a student for a career in academia, I'd say
that if they also have failed to provide the necessary base set of
skills industry is looking for, they are wasting time and money.
Second, much of what is happening is more due to the fact that the
*teachers* are becoming less proficient with time rather than the
students themselves. If industry was *really* interested in improving
the output of schools, the best solution would be to endow lots of
positions at public universities and community colleges so that those
teachers aren't making 1/3 to 1/2 (at best) of what they would be
making in industry.
Is that the "best" solution? Really? What sort of ROI can a company
expect from an endowment?
The current state of the schools is due to the students making very
rational economic choices.
Agreed.
Some of you may be aware that MIT has recently dumped SICP and Scheme
(known as 6.001) as their intro to computer programming. I don't go
to MIT so maybe I shouldn't care but it seems a shame that such a
well received and respected program is being changed when none of the
fundamentals of programming or the concepts being in the class have
changed.
As I understand it, though, the curriculum is switching to Python but
is also adding the concepts of how to control real robots. That means
that concurrency is going to move up in importance.
Actually, they already had stuff going on with robots, although it came
later in the curriculum. Also, given that they are working with
Python... I wouldn't assume that they runtime model will deal much with
concurrency at all.
That said, I think it is important to not that while 6.001 has it's
proponents, it also has its detractors. I have heard from more than one
CS profession that MIT's CS program is a "world unto itself" or "removed
from the rest of the CS world", etc. Employers even seem to prefer CS
students from other schools (also good schools mind you, but MIT has an
expectation that its students should be the best... just like all the
other top schools ;-).
--Chris
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