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From: billwolf%hazel.cs.clemson.edu@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe, 2847 )
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: CS education
Message-ID: <7023@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 13 Nov 89 18:42:08 GMT
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From crm@romeo.cs.duke.edu (Charlie Martin):
> There is also a lot of software engineering that has little or nothing
> whatsoever to do with computer science, and which I think belongs in a
> business school: things like life-cycle models, management metrics, etc.
> These are NOT the things which computer science or even traditional
> engineering deals with; they are much more like the quantitative methods
> that an MBA uses.

   Business schools exist to produce *non-technical* managers,
   and are unlikely to be interested in changing, even if it
   were appropriate (which I rather strongly doubt).  Technical
   management would be one of the things that would migrate away
   from CS into a software engineering department, which IMHO is 
   its proper position within the academic structure. 

> Even if you don't write an operating system yourself, there
> are problems in real-time programming that are essentially operating
> systems problems, and bugs in real-time programs that have to do with
> the precise operation of the operating system itself, e.g. the
> scheduler.  

   Operating systems is not a field which contains real-time 
   programming; if anything, it's the other way around.  Obviously
   scheduler operation is an important consideration in certain
   types of programming, but does this imply that one should train
   to BUILD schedulers or to USE them?   Obviously, the latter. 
     
> The techniques that come from learning to write compilers
> also are useful to solve a large variety of real-world problems even if
> you can't spend your time writing compilers.  

   The point is not that the time would be totally wasted, but that
   the time would be much better spent concentrating on software
   engineering or application problem solving rather than on systems
   programming. 
     
> And I think the mathematical sophistication that comes from learning 
> computability theory is central to learning, REALLY learning, how to 
> consider correctness in a program, of which software engineering has 
> no which-er.

   This was not disputed.


   Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu