Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?

Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?

Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?
stsc.hill.af.mil

Wait, I'm confused.

> "Over the last few years we have noticed worrisome trends in CS education. The following represents a summary of those trends:...the development of programming skills in several languages is giving way to cookbook approaches using large libraries and special-purpose packages."

I agree with the "several languages" part, but why is using a large library a worrisome trend? Is it really that bad?

Using a library doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. Programmers often advocate code reuse and using a library is an example of code reuse. If you need to sort data, use a provided sorting algorithm or one written by someone smarter rather than writing it yourself. If a problem is solved, don't solve it again, right?

Does it have to do with understanding the solution to the problem?

I particularly agree with this point -- "students need to be exposed to the tools to construct large-scale reliable programs..." The individual technical component is only half the story. Real "software engineering" involves developing software which can be understood by others, expanded and scaled, which I have found to be just as hard as nitty-gritty pointer math.

I work on the Fighter OS's and believe you me. They are complicated ada code.

EDIT: Tho, I do work on C# and C++ and the Mil is moving away from C# because it basically has a garbage collector....

I think they are referring to the fact that students new to programming learn to "always" rely on stringing together pre-existing libraries (namely in Java) rather than gaining experience by creating some functionality, algorithms, etc. from scratch.

FWIW, I took a class taught by Shonberg (about OOP) when I attended NYU. Ironically NYU CS majors are required to take several classes that use Java, so I guess he wasn't able to convince the administration of his views. However, I learned a tremendous amount from the algorithms and OS courses there, and there were some great classes still using C and C++.