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From: elg@usl.UUCP (Eric Lee Green)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: cs and ce
Message-ID: <872@usl.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 21-Aug-86 03:29:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: usl.872
Posted: Thu Aug 21 03:29:42 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Aug-86 01:15:23 EDT
References: <243@ndsuvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: elg@usl.UUCP (Eric Lee Green)
Organization: USL, Lafayette, LA
Lines: 59
Summary: 

In article <243@ndsuvax.UUCP> ncmagel@ndsuvax.UUCP (ken magel) writes:
>
>    What do you feel should be the relationship between CS and CE programs
>at the same school?  Should they cooperate, compete?  To what extent?  When 
>should institutions merge the programs rather than keep them independent?

      A "real" computer science curriculum might include an
architecture class, something like, "These EE guys built us a simple
68000-based microcomputer, and you'll have to write a very simple
operating system monitor for dealing with the disk drives and such".
This is much the way it happens in The Real World. To do this, you'd
need to have cooperating CS and CE courses. This is assuming that the
students in this class plan to do systems programming and not
commercial programming. If you are to do systems programming, you need
to know systems (which include both hardware and software). If you are
going to do commercial programming, a hefty dose of Accounting would
be better.

>How much hardware should a CS person see and how much software should
>a CE see?

      You just hit one of my pet peeves. I have seen too many students
who just feed their programs into a mysterious black box which spits
results back at them. They have no knowledge of what is actually going
on down in that black box they call a "computer".
      My first major, before CS, was CE. I also worked as an
electronics technician for awhile, repairing balky terminals at the
component level and installing electronic metering equipment (which is
pretty much all digital and computerized, nowadays). I find my
electronics experience pretty much invaluable insofar as compilers,
operating systems, device drivers, assembly language programming, and
other such things go. And there's often times even when I'm doing some
trivial things like a "grep" utility that some knowledge of the basic
principles of the OS, such as paging, IO subsystem, etc. is useful
(and the OS cannot be completely divorced from the extensive hardware
that supports it).
     It frightens me to think that there are people graduating from
computer science programs today who do not even know what a computer
is, just how to feed it in Cobol, Pascal or "C". It isn't necessary
for a CS student to learn advance circuit analysis and design. But
knowing basic electricity and what purposes such things as
transistors, filters, phased-lock-loops, etc. serve is basic knowledge
that is both useful and easy to learn, and should really be taught in
the early years of a person's CS career (certainly before that hapless
person takes architecture or OS courses, if he really wants to get
something out of those courses).
      As for the amount of CS that a CE should know: Hmm. People who
major in Computer Engineering as vs. Electrical Engineering should
have at least SOME programming knowledge, I suppose, but I don't have
an opinion on this one.
-- 

      Eric Green {akgua,ut-sally}!usl!elg
        (Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191, Lafayette, LA 70509)
          Bayou Telecommunications' ML guru, USL student

"The story so far:
 In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of
 people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."