Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site utcsri.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsri!coatta From: coatta@utcsri.UUCP (Terry Coatta) Newsgroups: net.cse Subject: Re: Re: Role of computer science Message-ID: <3477@utcsri.UUCP> Date: Fri, 10-Oct-86 12:14:05 EDT Article-I.D.: utcsri.3477 Posted: Fri Oct 10 12:14:05 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 10-Oct-86 12:17:33 EDT References: <10410@cca.UUCP> Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto Lines: 94 > > Now I am not complaining about this state of affairs. And if > all students were all to go on and become professors then there would > be no problem. But if they are (implicitly) told that, in effect, > "research is the only thing worth doing", and "working in industry > is selling out", and "the only things worth studying are those areas > of interest in academia", and "creating a production quality product ------------------------------------- > is irrelevant", and "intellectual curiosity is the pre-eminent value ------------- ----------------------------------------------- > and is more important than the needs of your employer" ----------------------------------------------------- Your first comment implies that work produced by academics is generally not of production quality, which I am inclined to interpret as meaning that it is somehow shabby. I do not believe this to be the case. The programs that I write (and the way I try to teach people to program) are hopefully well-written, well-commented, and well-documented. However, they do not generally include a lot of online help, the documentation is not aimed at the novice user, and a variety of small features (which I regard as being trivial to implement) may not be present. Thus, these prgrams are not of production quality -- but why should I bother to waste my time doing "busy-work", the university isn't paying me for the resulting boredom, I'm not learning anything (well perhaps I'm improving my typing skills), and I'm not going to market the thing anyway. The point is I could add these things if someone ordered me too, but I get upset when I have waste my time doing them when what I should be doing is LEARNING -- learning techniques for approaching problems, learning how to analyze, learning how to think. > > I also have reservations about the following: "If a student > wants to be a professional programmer, then a professional school is > the appropriate institution of post secondary education for them. > Those students attending universities should be well aware that the > training offered there is academic, not professional." What do you > mean by "a professional school"? Are you suggesting that someone > who wants to become an Electrical Engineer should not attend a > university? Would you like to go on record as saying that "The > training offered at Stanford is academic, not professional"? > I hope not. Perhaps you feel programming is a trade similar > to automobile repair and ought to be taught and regarded in the > same way. Again, I hope not. > Richard Harter, SMDS Inc. [Disclaimers not permitted by company policy.] > For Cheryl :-) I don't know why you hope not. When I was busy being an undergrad we had some people in from "industry" and they told us they didn't like to hire grads from the university because they were inclined to ask too many questions -- "Are you sure you want this feature? Wouldn't the system be better if...?" They said they wanted programmers who had a good grasp of a variety of languages, knew various standard techniques for accomplishing things (B-trees, ISAM...), and most of all WHO DID WHAT THEY WERE TOLD WITHOUT ASKING QUESTIONS. Now these programmers that they wanted sound a lot to me like car mechanics -- know the make, the model, fix it. I sincerely hope that graduates from university never do what they are told without asking any questions -- I hope that they have become critical thinkers, and will approach everything they do by asking questions, and finding the best way of doing it. I repeat, if I had wanted to go and get a job as a programmer I would not go to a university. I came to the university because I wanted to find out how compilers worked, I wanted to know about the theoretical underpinnings of these machines that I was working on, I wanted to be curious -- I did not want to know how to program in COBOL, I did not want to spend weeks adding help screens to my programs, I did not want to just sit back and do what I was told without being curious about whether there were other ways of do it. At the risk of severe flamage for excess rambling I'll go on a bit more. I suspect your idea of a professional programmer does not coincide with mine, and perhaps this is because your perception of the work environment for professional programmers is different. My experience is that the demands of the typical employer are "do what I want, and do it quickly before we lose any more profits". As long as this is the attitude that a professional programmer is going to encounter in the "real world" then better for professional programmers to be car mechanics -- it will result in a lot less aggravation for them. And since we don't train car mechanics at universities, lets not train their programmer counterparts their either. Terry Coatta Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 {allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsri!coatta -- Oh dear, I think you'll find reality's on the blink again Marvin the Paranoid Android