Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?

This guy suffers from the "schools are job training" mentality that I've noticed has grown in popularity recently. He expects students from the university to be able to work on his development environment without significant retraining, when he is not using the development environment that the universities are teaching.

The fault here is in the business owner expecting freshman grads to be skilled in highly specialized software development specific to their business. The schools are pumping out students who are perfectly good programmers, and if he actually trained them to use his tools, they would be good programmers for his environment.

Edit: To be clear, if the were a university teaching only Java to the students, it would be a bad university. Such a university doesn't exist. If he wants formal methods, he needs to higher Masters students or higher -- or optionally donate a few $$ to a CS department in exchange for adding the course to ugrad.

Edit 2: I'm going to stop editing this now.

Answer: they are working on other projects. The ones that have already left the stone age, and choose tools on merit rather than fear, dogma, and "that's the way we always did it".

Disclaimer: ex-defense programmer. Java. C++.

I took his (Dewar's) programming languages class in the master's program at NYU, and he certainly knows other languages well. He does have an Ada bias, but he had quite an uphill battle getting the master's students to write simple Ada programs during the part of the semester devoted to Ada. His basic complaint isn't about Ada specifically, and was well supported by his actual students' performance in Ada and Lisp, if I recall correctly.

> worrisome trends in CS education ... Mathematics requirements in CS programs are shrinking.

Speaking as someone who had to take several attempts at differential equations to pass it, and has (a) had a very solid career since graduation; (b) has never used even integration or differentiation a single time since graduation, let alone numeric methods, etc., I call BS.

Tons of math is useful for about 1% of programmers.

For the rest of us, it's just a form of hazing, like intern doctors being forced to work 48 hr shifts.

It all seems like a pretty fair assessment of what a programmer ought to know in terms of programming languages. We can all find things to disagree about in the details, but this seems very close to Eric Raymond's "how to become a hacker" essay. Python, C/C++, Java, Perl, and LISP. Maybe you'd want to switch out Perl for Ruby, and not bother with Ada, or add Haskell...

The thing that gets to me is that we fret so much about the curriculum. We all know the list, we either choose or don't choose to engage with it. I don't think this can be pushed into someone's head anyway.