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From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: cs and ce
Message-ID: <1099@bu-cs.bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: Fri, 22-Aug-86 20:55:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.1099
Posted: Fri Aug 22 20:55:13 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Aug-86 06:16:15 EDT
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 33


>     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

Not trying to be argumentative, but why?

I have nothing -against- knowing as much as you can, if you knew me
you'd know that I work hard at maintaining a fairly broad knowledge of
the beasts I work with, but that's not for everyone.

I guess I am looking at it from a little more pragmatic viewpoint,
being involved in CS education. The curriculum for an undergraduate
is quite crowded. I certainly use my systems course as an opportunity
to go over the structure of a computer (I agree that without some
overview of this they get funny ideas about how things work or, more
importantly, how things don't work.) But 'phased-lock-loops' sounds
a level or two beyond the detail I would expect from a computer scientist.

Do we teach computer engineers all about NP-complete, LALR(k) grammars
and augmented transition networks? No? Then how do they know what they
design the machines to run? etc etc.

Just curious. I think the field is getting broad enough that some
specialization is necessary, although people will still exist (and
will be looked up to) who are generalists.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University