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From: john@nmt.edu (John Shipman)
Newsgroups: misc.jobs.contract,comp.edu
Subject: Theory & practice at bachelor level (was Re: Qualified? or Dreaming?)
Message-ID: <1990Jul24.172510.7483@nmt.edu>
Date: 24 Jul 90 17:25:10 GMT
References: <1990Jul23.060010.20406@grian.cps.altadena.ca.us> <37714@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <1990Jul24.140502.17990@cec1.wustl.edu>
Organization: Zoological Data Processing
Lines: 46

H. Conrad Cunningham (conrad@wucs1.wustl.edu) writes:
+--
| CS curricula should be focussed on principles rather than specific
| technologies.  Emphasis should be given to concepts which cut across
| several areas of technology, instead of arbitrarily breaking CS into
| many technology-oriented subfields.
+--

I agree that a focus on principles is what distinguishes a
``real'' degree.  But when it comes to debating theory vs.
practice, I will always argue for a mixture of the two, at
least for our particular bachelor's program.

Even for those who are strongly oriented toward theory, I
recommend practical exercises as a superior way to learn the
material.  One who has had to rework a grammar to remove
ambiguities is likely to have a much better grasp of how
grammars work than someone who has only read about grammar.

I feel that the New Mexico Tech bachelor's curriculum should
prepare a student equally for industry or for grad school.
A lot of our students aren't sure initially which way
they'll go.  As more of our bachelor's graduates go to
industry than to grad school, I think it would be a bad idea
to exclude practical material from our core program.
Perhaps larger schools can afford the luxury of degrees that
are oriented one way or the other.

+--
| Instead of a core course on "operating systems" why not a
| course on "concurrent programming".  Such a course could
| unify important concurrency-related concepts drawn from
| operating systems, programming languages, database systems,
| networks, algorithmics, computer architecture, computation
| theory, etc.  Couldn't such a course be more useful as well
| as conceptually cleaner.
+--

As it happens, concurrency takes up almost half the lectures
in our OS course, starting with theory and extending through
practical techniques for dealing with concurrency problems.
A lot of related issues in languages, networks and architecture
are discussed here and in our architecture course.
-- 
John Shipman/Computer Science Department/New Mexico Tech/Socorro, NM 87801
(505)835-5301; john@jupiter.nmt.edu