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From: larry@jc3b21.UUCP (Lawrence F. Strickland)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re:  CS degrees, are they useful?
Message-ID: <166@jc3b21.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 19-Feb-86 20:22:35 EST
Article-I.D.: jc3b21.166
Posted: Wed Feb 19 20:22:35 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 21-Feb-86 07:29:51 EST
Organization: St. Petersburg Jr. College, FL
Lines: 43

><3422@nsc.UUCP> <1405@gitpyr.UUCP>

>A comment from a person without a completed CS degree (I've math degrees)
>formerly working toward a phd who's gone to bat for CS degrees.

Well, I really didn't want to step into this one, having several of the
aformentioned problems (my degrees are in Math and Education, we are a
two-bit state school [that one really hurt], and our program is out of
Engineering Technology [close as you'll ever get to EE here]), but this
thing could easily get out of hand without focusing on the main point.

What everyone is really saying (in my biased opinion) is that a lot of
CS degree programs are not worth the paper needed to print the course
descriptions.  TRUE.  Both IEEE and ACM have realized this and are now
in the process of (slowly) accrediting schools for CS programs and any-
thing else that even vaguely looks like a CS program.  GREAT.

All the comments that were made simply say that a good Computer Scientist
(I DID NOT SAY PROGRAMMER) has to know things other than how to locate the
computer room when its raining outside.  A sprinkling of math, a bit of
business, some accounting, a little chemistry, some physics, etc. etc. ad
nauseum are all important.  You can be a good programmer without knowing
these, but eventually you will be tripped up by an algorithm you don't know
or a piece of 'general knowledge' that you somehow missed.  Maybe it will
take the form of using Bubble sort to sort 1,000,000 floating point numbers
directly on disk, or maybe it will be spending 80 hours doing a three-
dimensional plotting program only to discover the molecules it was supposed
to graph are all planar!

Instead of this, how about coming up with a good CS program.  I asked for
this a couple of months ago and got exactly two responses one of which had
to do with a course NOT to include, but no courses TO include.  Great, huh!
Those people were helpful, but where was everyone else?????????????????????
What do we need and what don't we need to make a superior program??????????

-----Larry Strickland
     St. Petersburg Junior College
     St. Petersburg, FL 33542

     ...akgua!akguc!codas!peora!ucf-cs!usfvax2!3b2bame!jc3b21!larry
                    (or something like that)