Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!gatech!mcnc!ecsvax!hes
From: hes@ecsvax.UUCP (Henry Schaffer)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: What is CS? (Was re First languages)
Message-ID: <4807@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: 23 Mar 88 19:12:32 GMT
References: <4022@ames.arpa> <2400002@otter.HP.COM> <932@its63b.ed.ac.uk> <1000@mcgill-vision.UUCP>
Organization: NC State Univ.
Lines: 35
Summary: getting one's hands dirty

In article <1000@mcgill-vision.UUCP>, mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP (der Mouse) writes:
>... 
> It seems to me that the Computer Science curriculum should teach
> Computer Science.  The art of programming does not seem to me to be a
> part of Computer Science; it belongs somewhere else (software
> engineering maybe?).  
I would like to disagree with this idea.  (Note that I've cut into the middle
of a paragraph - continued below.)  I see this idea of the "theory" being
isolated from the "real world" cutting into all academic fields.  Engineers
who have never seen a machine, biologists who have never seen a frog or a
flower, and now computer scientists who have never seen a program?  I see
programming as being equivilent to the lab part of science courses.  One gets
a small amount of academic credit for the lab part of a course - the work is
usually much greater than the credit hours would indicate - the lab is
considered to be a necessary part of gaining an understanding - not a 
substitute for the "Science" which is covered in the lectures.  (Unfortunately,
the lab parts of science courses have been abbreviated or dropped over the
past decade.  I believe that this is a *bad* thing, and that it has been done
mostly to save money in teaching - and that many faculty have acquiesced
because they have thought that concepts can be taught in isolation.
>           This is not to say that CS students shouldn't be
> taught any programming, but rather that we should not pretend that
> programming is really part of CS proper.
Ok, this is the rest of the paragraph - so you see I did take the first part
out of context [just a little!] - but I still disagree with the end.  I'll
argue that programming is just as much really part of CS proper as the frog,
worm and flower (anatomy) form really part of the Biological sciences proper.
(I'm not saying that programming is the core of CS, nor that identifying
flower parts is the core of biology - but there is a great difference between
being the core and not really belonging to the field.)
> ... [much deleted - I've gone on long enough] 
> 					der Mouse
--henry schaffer  n c state univ
P.S.  Isn't this isomorphic to our recent discussion on whether people
should learn arithmetic?