Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!ria!csd.uwo.ca!brown From: brown@csd.uwo.ca (Mike Brown) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: The CS "religion" (was Re: It looks like he's at it again!) Message-ID: <665@ria.ccs.uwo.ca> Date: 16 Jul 90 16:23:28 GMT References: <1990Jul12.012730.4248@Stardent.COM> <64044@sgi.sgi.com> Sender: news@ria.ccs.uwo.ca Reply-To: brown@csd.uwo.ca (Mike Brown) Followup-To: comp.misc Organization: Computer Science Department - Univ. of Western Ontario Lines: 30 In article , rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) writes: |> |> There are definitely days I think all CS majors should be forced to |>take a class where they actually talk with a user and have to write a |>program for the user, and have part of their grade based on how well |>it works, the user interface, etc. Probably impractical, but I think |>it can be done better than it is right now. |> I completely agree and that's why I took CS611 here, a Masters level course in Software Engineering which includes a year-long project for a real user. This year we (3 of us) did an X Windows-based scholarly text processing system for an English professor (SGML, TeX, etc). I worked for 3 years before coming back for my Masters, but being the architect of a project of this size (15,000 lines) and working with the client to come up with the best solution to his problem was quite a learning experience. I would reccommend it to every CS student - get this kind of experience as early as you can! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mike Brown, Gradual Student in Computer Science, University of Western Ontario brown@csd.uwo.ca ..then the bartender says "That's not a duck!". (Wait for laughter) "Four score and seven years ago ..." (G. Larsen)