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From: madd@world.std.com (jim frost)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: CS education
Message-ID: <1989Nov15.221433.11050@world.std.com>
Date: 15 Nov 89 22:14:33 GMT
Article-I.D.: world.1989Nov15.221433.11050
References: <7024@hubcap.clemson.edu> <7036@hubcap.clemson.edu> <89319.113524UH2@PSUVM.BITNET>
Organization: Software Tool & Die
Lines: 32

UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer) writes:
>In article <7036@hubcap.clemson.edu>, ofut@hubcap.clemson.edu (A. Jeff Offutt)
>says:
>>Here's one of my ideas for a perfect software engineering project:

>how about a HyperText system?  Nobody really agrees on what
>it should do or how it should work.

In the software engineering course I took at Boston Univ, this is
exactly what we had to do.  "Implement a hypertext system any way you
want."

It was educational for me; I got to see what happened when the media
chosen was relatively unknown to most of the members of a group (one
group implemented theirs in lisp under emacs; one programmer did most
of the work because he was the only one who knew lisp), and what
happens if you split the members of a group into the functional parts
outlined in Mythical Man Month (which is what my group did, with
excellent success).

This kind of project is interesting because it is simple enough to be
done in a couple of weeks, but is useful and touches many of the same
implementation problems as you find in an operating system, without
being overly complex.  I'm still pretty proud of our original design,
although the user interface could have been much snappier.

A good SE project, but bzs was always good at finding neat projects
for us to do :-).

jim frost
software tool & die     "The World" Public Access Unix for the '90s
madd@std.com            +1 617-739-WRLD  24hrs {3,12,24}00bps