Darren New wrote: > James G. Sack (jim) wrote: >> "I probably didn't capture it well and Alan wasn't specific, but two >> things I understood he thought ought to be taught first were parallelism >> and loose coupling. He mentioned that the Internet is more about those >> two things that it is about data structures and algorithms." > > That's a rather vague thing to teach. Everyone already understands > parallelism and loose coupling, at an intuitive level. How do you get > computers to do that? >
I wouldn't really name a course with such a title, but to me, it seems reasonable to emphasize those concepts in a first course on programming -- I doubt spaghetti coding and unnecessarily interdependent modules/routines will go away from pure intuition. ;-) I also thought SJS's defense of algorithms and data structures as a _setting_ for teaching larger concepts made sense. Hmm, what actually is on the menu these days? How many computer related majors are there? Is programming a valid curriculum or just a part of (say) software engineering -- or just an incidental skill, like algebra. Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
