11–20 of 43 posts
Looks like ye olde blog is a bit slammed at the moment, apologies. (If only my university CS program taught me how to be a Wordpress sysadmin!)
Maybe try this introduction to web publishing with wordpress [1]. Google cache of the blog post: Also, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... [1] http://codelesson.com/courses/view/introduction-to-web-publi...
Looks like ye olde blog is a bit slammed at the moment, apologies. (If only my university CS program taught me how to be a Wordpress sysadmin!)
A couple of useful links:
http://blog.jeffreymcmanus.com.nyud.net/%C2%AD1924/%C2%ADmor...
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
did you actually read the post? i actually pre-rebutted both of your arguments. i understand quite well what a CS program is, since (as i pointed out in the post) i've been a student in three university CS programs and taught coding at a fourth. i'm saying that most of what goes on in academic CS departments is not what we need as a society and it's not what most undergrads hope to get into when they enroll. most und…
There's no engineering without a solid theoretical background. You want to do civil engineering, they'll make sure you thoroughly understand Newton's laws; electrical, Kirchhoff's. And that's just the start. In fact, you're much better prepared to build big bridges if all you've studied is theoretical physics than if you had personally built a crossing over every ditch on campus.
The point of my post is not that theory is worthless (which I call out several times in the post). It's really that there is more than one way to learn this stuff and that most undergraduates pick out a sub-optimal path for cargo-cult reasons (such as the "halo effect" of elite universities which I also called out in the post).
I think you're missing the entire point of what a Computer Science program is. It's not to teach programming. It's to teach computing theory, algorithm design, etc. That's the reason that the top-level university programs are so heavy on theory. That just happens to fit with systems programmers(who somehow aren't software engineers... curious). It also fits with game programmers, which is where I think a lot of CS st…
did you actually read the post? i actually pre-rebutted both of your arguments. i understand quite well what a CS program is, since (as i pointed out in the post) i've been a student in three university CS programs and taught coding at a fourth. i'm saying that most of what goes on in academic CS departments is not what we need as a society and it's not what most undergrads hope to get into when they enroll. most und…
I don't think that catering to what undergrads want is a good thing, at all. The majority of undergrads are 17 to 21 year old kids that really don't know what they want to do. They don't know the industries they want to get into. I certainly didn't, and my experiences at UIUC turned me away from going into game programming to a totally different space. And I wasn't a good programmer out of college. I was pretty terrible. But work has taught me a LOT, most of which I wouldn't understand without the theory basis.
>software engineering is obviously teachable (i've been doing it for 20 years) and that's true even if you personally didn't have any good software engineering instructors or mentors. it looks like you and i are in agreement that rapid change in software engineering makes universities not the optimal place to teach software engineering (that was the point of my post). but it doesn't follow that because universities are bad at this, that software engineering is "not teachable".
Like I said in my post, the difficulty of teaching programming and SE in general is that it's changing at an incredibly rapid pace. Languages have evolved. C/C++ were the de-facto languages for a while, then Java gained quite bit of popularity. Recently, C# seems to have taken a large majority of the mindshare.
20 years ago, a lot of SE practices were highly structured, highly documented(and highly wasting of time) systems. IBM's RUP is one example. 10-15 years ago, less structured systems like XP started showing up, and gained quite a bit of popularity. In the last few years, Agile has become very popular. I learned about RUP and XP in my SE courses, but the place I work at doesn't use any of the above.
So what would the program teach? Just the most current, up to date stuff? Or would you try to teach a bit of everything?
The problem with teaching just the brand new shiny is that you end up with the Java mills from the 90's. They're not teaching programming. They're teaching Java. And it may be worthless in a year. While that may just be what the student wants, it's not what society needs.
I think you're missing the entire point of what a Computer Science program is. It's not to teach programming. It's to teach computing theory, algorithm design, etc. That's the reason that the top-level university programs are so heavy on theory. That just happens to fit with systems programmers(who somehow aren't software engineers... curious). It also fits with game programmers, which is where I think a lot of CS st…
did you actually read the post? i actually pre-rebutted both of your arguments. i understand quite well what a CS program is, since (as i pointed out in the post) i've been a student in three university CS programs and taught coding at a fourth. i'm saying that most of what goes on in academic CS departments is not what we need as a society and it's not what most undergrads hope to get into when they enroll. most und…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
did you actually read the post? i actually pre-rebutted both of your arguments. i understand quite well what a CS program is, since (as i pointed out in the post) i've been a student in three university CS programs and taught coding at a fourth. i'm saying that most of what goes on in academic CS departments is not what we need as a society and it's not what most undergrads hope to get into when they enroll. most und…
My problem with your position is that what you are proposing does not require a 4 year degree. I think a 6 month to one year vocational program would be of more advantage to a student than a 4 year degree in what amounts to a vocational education. The problem with this, is that no one respects a vocational education and no one views it as a competent replacement for a 4 year degree (even if the student is better prep…
"no one respects a vocational education" is cargo cult thinking. elite universities don't write world-changing software, educated, motivated people do.
i come not to butcher academia. as one of the least reformable institutions in our society, i'm pretty much indifferent to academia.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
did you actually read the post? i actually pre-rebutted both of your arguments. i understand quite well what a CS program is, since (as i pointed out in the post) i've been a student in three university CS programs and taught coding at a fourth. i'm saying that most of what goes on in academic CS departments is not what we need as a society and it's not what most undergrads hope to get into when they enroll. most und…
>i'm saying that most of what goes on in academic CS departments is not what we need as a society and it's not what most undergrads hope to get into when they enroll. most undergrads get into CS to write software, not to learn "theory" or "compiler design" (although, again, as i pointed out in the post, if this happens to be your bag, more power to you -- but this isn't really about you, it's about the mismatch betwe…
that's not what i proposed at all. what i propose is to bring curriculum into the 21st century, and to call out the fact that cargo cult thinking and poor organization on the part of universities are standing in the way of that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My problem with your position is that what you are proposing does not require a 4 year degree. I think a 6 month to one year vocational program would be of more advantage to a student than a 4 year degree in what amounts to a vocational education. The problem with this, is that no one respects a vocational education and no one views it as a competent replacement for a 4 year degree (even if the student is better prep…
i agree that what i am proposing does not require a 4-year degree. i don't think that most undergraduates should spend four years in school. "no one respects a vocational education" is cargo cult thinking. elite universities don't write world-changing software, educated, motivated people do. i come not to butcher academia. as one of the least reformable institutions in our society, i'm pretty much indifferent to acad…
Mosaic, which was the precursor to Netscape and IE, came from a project at NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
But what really helps me is that 4 years of being exposed to all this crazy theory has affected my brain in a certain way: it has altered my perception of problems.
Before going into CS I was programming by chance: slap some code together (without really understanding the problem domain) and poke it with a stick until it somehow works the you want it to. I think most kids who are just learning to program do that. However, that approach changed radically after I spent some time at the university. In that sense, CS has been really useful, at least in my case. Btw, I'm not saying those skills could not have been obtained elsewhere.
And learning theory really broadens your horizons. Things like computability theory, I have no use for them in my day job, but they're just interesting. Back at the uni, I had a blast writing a turing machine "emulator" and programming it instead of manually writing the assignment on paper :) And yes, you could study them in your spare time, but the truth is, the job eats up so much of your time, and makes you so exhausted that you barely have the resources to follow an online lecture after a long day at work. So why not spend some time learning while you still free from most of the responsibilities of adult life?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>i'm saying that most of what goes on in academic CS departments is not what we need as a society and it's not what most undergrads hope to get into when they enroll. most undergrads get into CS to write software, not to learn "theory" or "compiler design" (although, again, as i pointed out in the post, if this happens to be your bag, more power to you -- but this isn't really about you, it's about the mismatch betwe…
> I don't think that catering to what undergrads want is a good thing, at all that's not what i proposed at all. what i propose is to bring curriculum into the 21st century, and to call out the fact that cargo cult thinking and poor organization on the part of universities are standing in the way of that.
I don't quite understand what you mean by that. Dijkstra's algorithm is the same both in 20 and 21st centuries, ditto for red-black trees. Are you proposing universities should be teaching iOS programming and web development with ruby instead of data structures and complexity theory?