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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: <7147@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 21 Nov 89 01:33:47 GMT
References: <16109@duke.cs.duke.edu>
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From crm@romeo.cs.duke.edu (Charlie Martin):
>>   Business schools exist to produce *non-technical* managers,
>
> Stanford, Duke, are both schools that I am aware make a heavy emphasis
> on quantative modelling of the things managers manage.  That is,
> people, schedules, risks, costs ... 

   Technical management does not mean "management which uses
   quantitative techniques"... it means "management of highly
   technical activities", which requires a detailed understanding 
   of the technology being applied.  
  
> I think first of all that you're raising a straw man: there are more
> degrees of freedom than "we can have OS or more SE but not both."  

   Given that there are a finite number of semester hours available
   in any degree-seeking program, this is precisely the case.
 
> I think it would be far more useful to have BOTH a strong OS requirement
> AND a strong background in the issues of software engineering.  

   Not if OS is irrelevant to the student in question.  

> Operating systems classes are often the first chance to see a linked 
> list used for anything beside exercise 11 in the text.

   Only if the operating systems classes are coincidentally 
   the first classes taken after data structures.
  
> (2) The understanding of the operating system concepts from an OS
> course -- as I've mentioned -- can be essential to understanding the
> behavior of a program, or predicting the behavior of the program
> during design.  (I could go into the war story about a guy I once
> worked for who was designing a real-time system with 220 processes

   Then let scheduling algorithms be considered in courses on real-time
   programming.  Scheduling algorithms are by no means going to require
   an entire semester of operating systems material, so that still leaves 
   lots of unneeded material which an OS course would needlessly cover.

> (3) Operating systems offer the first chance in most cases to introduce
> things like mutual exclusion and record management (reader-writer
> problems).

   Simply because there are not courses on concurrent programming
   in general.  There are many applications for concurrent programming
   which do not involve operating systems.  This is simply another
   attempt to claim that operating systems are good because of 
   incidental side effects which should instead be taken directly.


   Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu