231–240 of 308 posts
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Did you use ChatGPT to write this?
No
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Unfortunately "ethics" can also be a sneaky way to insert "politics" into the curriculum.
I've never seen this. Is this some weird right wing talking point? I have seen a disconnect between what is covered in ethics classes and the types of scenarios students will encounter in the working world. My (one) ethics class was useless. But not political even with the redrawn ethical map of the Trump era.
I'm not really sure how you could totally separate politics (forming laws) from ethics anyway.
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One question, why are you prepending zero to every single year?
Usually it's because of an initiative by the Long Now Foundation that is supposed, among other things, to raise awareness about their 10,000 years clock and what it stands for. See https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...
But I hate it. It makes most readers stumble over the dates, and it does so to grind an axe that is completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
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Actually a lot of degrees have a relevant ethics class.
I don't disagree that such classes exist, but I have yet to see an ethics lab specifically with the intention of practicing refusal.
> CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies Alan Kay, my favorite curmudgeon, spent decades trying to remind us we keep reinventing concepts that were worked out in the late 70s and he’s disappointed we’ve been running in circles ever since. He’s still disappointed because very few programmers are ever introduced to the history of computer science in the way that artists study the history of art or philosophers the histo…
> Alan Kay, my favorite curmudgeon, spent decades trying to remind us Alan Kay giving the same (unique, his own, not a bad) speech at every conference for 50 years is not Alan Kay being a curmudgeon > we keep reinventing concepts that were worked out in the late 70s and he’s disappointed we’ve been running in circles ever since. it's Alan Kay running in circles
> CSCI 2100: Unlearning Object-Oriented Programming?? People in tech industry, seem to have no idea how the systems in the wild work. Enterprise Java runs the backbone of operations for all of large business organisations such as banks. It is just as grounded as MS Office is. It is object-oriented software that is running the bulk of production environments of the world. Who is going to maintain these systems for the…
If you think programmers should defer to bank managers on what the best way to design software is, do you also think that bank managers should defer to plumbers on what the best way to manage liquidity is?
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Art and Philosophy are hardly regarded as science, either. Actually, less so. Yet...
Philosophy is definitely a social or formal science (depending on who you ask).
> CSCI 3300: Classical Software Studies Alan Kay, my favorite curmudgeon, spent decades trying to remind us we keep reinventing concepts that were worked out in the late 70s and he’s disappointed we’ve been running in circles ever since. He’s still disappointed because very few programmers are ever introduced to the history of computer science in the way that artists study the history of art or philosophers the histo…
The history of art or philosophy spans millenia. The effective history of computing spans a lifetime or three. There's no sense comparing the two. In the year 2500 it might make sense to be disappointed that people don't compare current computational practices with things done in 2100 or even 1970, but right now, to call what we have "history" does a disservice to the broad meaning of that term. Another issue: art an…
Consider transport. Millennia ago, before the domestication of the horse, the fastest a human could travel was by running. That's a peak of about 45 km/h, but around 20 km/h sustained over a long distance for the fastest modern humans; it was probably a bit less then. Now that's about 900 km/h for commercial airplanes (45x faster) or 3500 km/h for the fastest military aircraft ever put in service (178x faster). Space travel is faster still, but so rarely used for practical transport I think we can ignore it here.
My current laptop, made in 2022 is thousands of times faster than my first laptop, made in 1992. It has about 8000 times as much memory. Its network bandwidth is over 4000 times as much. There are few fields where the magnitude of human technology has shifted by such large amounts in any amount of time, much less a fraction of a human lifespan.
I would add debugging as a course. Maybe they should teach this but how to dive deep into figuring out how to learn the root cause of defects and various tools would have been enormously helpful for me. Perhaps this already exists
Yes please. Even senior engineers apply with their debugging abilities limited to sprinkling print-exit over the code. Do you have a moment to talk about our saviour, Lord interactive debugging?
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> To assert that the way problems were solved in 1970 obviously has dramatic lessons for how to solve them in 2025 seems to me to completely miss what we're actually doing with computers. True they might not all be "dramatic lessons" for us, but to ignore them and assume that they hold no lessons for us is also a tragic waste of resources and hard-won knowledge.
Its because CS is not cared about as a true science for the most part. Nearly all of the field is focused on consolidating power and money dynamics. No one cares to make a comprehensive history since it might give your competitors an edge.