And here we have the reason why just about every single CS department in the US teaches Java instead of C or Scheme.
The real failure here is the words "instead of". It's really not hard to learn both and especially good to learn when to use which.
Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
51–60 of 127 posts
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#52Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Java and Python and Scala are not improvements. Why? They're too easy. Pointers are hard (relatively). Compiler design is hard. Complexity theory is hard. A loss in any one of these sections is a loss to the degree as a whole. The ACM ICPC helps a little in promoting intelligent problem solving (every CS student should be able to write a program to use Dijkstra's algorithm in under 20 minutes from memory ), but i…
About pointers being difficult...I don't think that pointers are difficult to understand. To me it was more the syntax C uses that got in the way.
You have got to be kidding us. But I don't really get it - what is difficult in & and * operators?
I do teach programming, and most of the time I see both the concept of pointers, and syntax is pretty understandable.
The real trouble begins when you expect students to use them to their advantage - but it really is beyond syntax.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#54> By pre-1990 standards about 20% of the students should have been failed. Interesting, I find that number quite low. The failure rates for most CS courses at my BSc/MSc university (VU Amsterdam) usually hovered around 50% in the post-00s era, especially for the hard-line courses such as computer networks, finite fields and data structures. We were allowed to do an unlimited number of retrials (6 months in between),…
I don't understand the value of failing students in this way. At medical school I failed some exams but was allowed to retake them, and received coaching for one of the re-takes. (Relax, I had to prove I'd learned the material before I could work with patients.)
At my brother's economics PhD, however, the school (can you guess which it is) took pride in failing 50% of the class. Why? And when the students are going into so much debt, why is this appropriate? Pick students who can pass your exams in reasonable numbers, reject those who cannot, and then invest in teaching the ones you chose.
Bravado over failing students to demonstrate how difficult your course is is a waste of human talent.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real failure here is the words "instead of". It's really not hard to learn both and especially good to learn when to use which.
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My god. It's truly amazing how any technical or academic topic seems to degenerate into a Java vs C debate. Is there a law for that?
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#56And here we have the reason why just about every single CS department in the US teaches Java instead of C or Scheme.
At my university, Intro to Prog. is in C and C++ (yes, both), and the course that immediately follows is in Scheme, some made up language (we had to build an interpreter for that language in Scheme) and Haskell (for the motivated students).
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#57I can't comment on the US experience, but as a student in the UK in the 80s and Canada in the 90s I concur with Mark Tarver. This is not just a CS issue, it's universal and the real damage is being done in the second tier establishments where grade inflation and dumbed-down courses are endemic. The tier one establishments (Oxbrige, Ivy League etc) can still use their own screening methodologies for aptitude and smart…
> This is not just a CS issue, it's universal and the real damage is being done in the second tier establishments where grade inflation and dumbed-down courses are endemic.
It's worse that that, because the dumbing down doesn't just effect universities. Secondary school science education has also been badly hit. The links that follow contain actual questions from GCSE science exams (note for non-British people: a GCSE is an exam typically taken by 16 year olds).
For example, in a biology exam, a question asked whether you see with your eye, ears, nose or mouth -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/do-you-see-with-yo...
Here's a physics exam, that's not quite as absurd -- http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2007/08/31/gcses-are-dumbed-d...
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
About pointers being difficult...I don't think that pointers are difficult to understand. To me it was more the syntax C uses that got in the way.
You have got to be kidding us. But I don't really get it - what is difficult in & and * operators? I do teach programming, and most of the time I see both the concept of pointers, and syntax is pretty understandable. The real trouble begins when you expect students to use them to their advantage - but it really is beyond syntax.
Unfortunately I'm not. I tried learning C as my second language after VB and the syntax seemed unnecessarily complicated to me (like '->').
As a newb, you get bogged down in the details and knowing the cases for when to use &,* seems like an added complication.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have a supervisor. You have many and they hide behind anonymity -- namely your peers who evaluate your papers, grant proposals, etc. In a way this is much worse than having a supervisor in industry. At least your supervisor wants you to succeed. Your peers not so much unless it suits their agenda. The freedom you have is only an illusion. What good is this freedom if your grant proposals / papers get reject…
Well, it sounds like we want to live our lives in different ways. Which is fine. In any case, as I said, academia does have its downside. So, I think, does working for a large company, or starting a small one. Life is full of trade-offs. > In startups, you can more easily explore ideas and change them without worrying about evaluation methodology. Ultimately, your criteria for success are simple: how many users do yo…
Nowadays, you can build apps/services as a one person company. You don't need to make that much money as your expenses are minimal.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't have a supervisor. You have many and they hide behind anonymity -- namely your peers who evaluate your papers, grant proposals, etc. In a way this is much worse than having a supervisor in industry. At least your supervisor wants you to succeed. Your peers not so much unless it suits their agenda. The freedom you have is only an illusion. What good is this freedom if your grant proposals / papers get reject…
Moreover, your freedom is severely restricted by the scientific approach demanded by computer science. It is hard to fund/publish novel ideas that are not easy to evaluate. What? That's the point -- science is hard. If it weren't hard it wouldn't be worth doing. I guess you could argue that academia is bad because you don't get to sit around and jerk off and collect a pay check, and you'd be right, but you would comp…
I don't care about advancement of a field. I care about working on novel ideas that are of interest to me.