Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!bbn!rochester!ur-tut!msir_ltd
From: msir_ltd@ur-tut (Mark Sirota)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: American Programmer
Message-ID: <1583@ur-tut.UUCP>
Date: 31 Mar 88 10:04:29 GMT
References: <555@psu-cs.UUCP> <1434@ur-tut.UUCP> <3415@bunker.UUCP> <3326@zeus.TEK.COM> <461@vsi.UUCP> <5775@bunny.UUCP>
Reply-To: msir_ltd@tut.cc.rochester.edu (Mark Sirota)
Organization: Univ. of Rochester, Computing Center
Lines: 52

It would seem that the gist of this conversation is that college CS
departments aren't teaching proper programming skills.  I have two major
points to make on this:

(1) As has been pointed out by several people, you can't just "teach"
    programming skills; experience is really the only tutor here.  (You can
    teach *techniques*, but I claim that they're not learned until they're
    used.  You can tell a student what to use, but he/she hasn't learned it
    until he/she has done so.)

    To get around this, people have suggested writing 10,000 line
    programs, or continually working on the same program for 4 years.
    This is fine; it closely mirrors what actually happens out there in
    the programming world.  However, I really don't think it will ever
    happen in colleges; these things are really too hard to manage.
    
    In the real programming world, you spend 8 hours a day (more or less)
    working on distinct projects, with a goal and deadline in mind,
    frequently with other people, taking care to make this well-done
    enough for other people to work on once you're done with this job.

    In school, you write a program to cater to the audience that will read
    it, much as you write an English paper.  In this case, the audience is
    usually just the grader.  You can usually assume the grader knows the
    language you're using, so you can skip those silly comments, but in
    the real world this may not be the case.  (Note that this is just one
    simple example; differences like this abound.)

    Another example is the introductory programming course - You can tell
    people what a linked list is, but they're never gonna understand until
    they use one.

    What I'm getting at is that work experience is really the only way to
    properly teach programming skills; classes can only approximate it.

(2) Computer Science departments *shouldn't* be teaching programming
    skills anyway; leave that to the Software Engineering department.
    Other disciplines haev separate Science and Engineering departments,
    like Physics/Mechanical Engineering, Chemistry/Chemical Engineering,
    and the like.  Why not have Computer Science/Software Engineering?
    (Hardware Engineering exists too; it's usually called Computer
    Engineering, which I don't think is really very fair.)

Here at the University of Rochester, the CS department churns out some
damn good computer scientists.  Most of them can't program to save their
lives, and they often hate the programming courses in the curriculum.  It
is important to recognize the difference between a software engineer (some
call it a "programmer" and a computer scientist.
-- 

Mark Sirota
 msir_ltd%tut.cc.rochester.edu@cs.rochester.edu (rochester!ur-tut!msir_ltd)