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From: rsd@sei.cmu.edu (Richard S D'Ippolito)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: CS education
Message-ID: <4972@ae.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 16 Nov 89 16:51:12 GMT
References: <7036@hubcap.clemson.edu> <876@awdprime.UUCP>
Reply-To: rsd@sei.cmu.edu (Richard S D'Ippolito)
Organization: Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 30

In article <876@awdprime.UUCP> Ron Woan writes:

>...Operating
>systems projects can teach students about scheduling and interprocess
>communications and other concepts that can be applied to a great
>variety of general programs. Not to mention that the better you
>understand operating systems designs, the more able you will be to
>take advantage of the operating systems. 

At the engineering design level, all of this is just implementation detail.
I expect the implementation language and compiler designers to have taken
care of all of that.


>...In much the same light,
>compiler projects can give programmers have a good idea of how to
>write code that can be better optimized in general.

Same thing -- this is valuable stuff and is a necessary part of computer
science (though very specialized, like courses in large rotating machine
design in the EE department), but it is not really teaching software
engineering.


Rich
-- 
We use kill ratios to measure how the war is going.
We use SLOC ratios to measure how our software is coming.
(Idea from Gary Seath)                                        rsd@sei.cmu.edu
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