How come they're so good, and we're so bad?
Yes, we're a pathetic lot. Brian's notion of academic Darwinism appeals to my neanderthal senses -- I would've been one of the earliest victims.
Would we turn out programming geniuses if we were to turn our liberal arts heavy universities into engineering schools? Drop this ratio studiorum nonsense? I don't know. If that were true then the programming skills of graduates of a local engineering school should be the bar against which all others are measured.
My unconsidered opinion is that there's more to our dismal performance than education. It may have something to do about our values as a culture.
However, if you just want to incubate uber geeks to crush the competition in these ACM contests then that should be fairly easy -- just raid the local science high schools and put the candidates through an intense crash course in computer science where they exit with the equivalent of a masters degree (isn't that like a licentiate?). Of course we may produce a few gifted sociopaths every now and then but if we keep on voting movie stars into the presidency then that can't be any worse, no?
If you can look past my non sequitur, programming is a difficult skill with areas of specialization. You can be very good in one area and merely competent in others. A strong math background is a great advantage for programming contests. However, the softer skills also play a big role when programming in the large where there are no lone wolf programmers. I have found my liberal arts education very helpful in this regard. Doubtless, I would be a much better algorithm designer if I did better in math but I can't say with certainty that more math would have made me a better programmer.
If most of the problems I encounter were as nicely delimited as programming contest questions then life would be much simpler and more fun. Can you imagine writing write-once code with no thought to reusability? Heaven! Even when I get these gems I can't just sling code with abandon. Considerations for the "next programmer" keep getting in the way.
Before I step off my soapbox I'm pretty confident that we'll get better results in the future. The new generation of teachers seem to enjoy what they're doing. As Alan Perlis said, "I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing."*
Party on!
--bong
See, I've read the fly leaf on SICP :)
-- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
