I agree, but I think this leads to the point that we’re really missing here: a singular, good programmer is someone who can wear many hats (cs, seng, engr, math, writing and probably a few more for the right brain side of things). Realistically, no one graduates with all of this and I think schools realize this. Instead, they set out to give you a choice of degrees to start with as the basis for a good programming career. The rest of the way is left to the individual in cooperation with whoever they work for or with.

Any language that uses curly braces will mess up the students minds and they should not be exposed to those languages before they can program.

In ancient times C++ shops would recruit people who started out with Ada because they were far better programmers than people who started out with C++.

A 50% reduction in time spent to finish a task was never an argument for Comp Sci graduates to change programming language. So much for science.

greetings,

Being a good ’street programmer’ or hacker is an excellent background for understanding CS courses. I found that I understood the questions automatically and the answers reasonable soon. It also helped me get through my projects more quickly.

I also found that CS courses made me a much better programmer, and wish I could have taken a graduate degree in CS, but that just wasn’t practical.

Nothing, however, prepares you for dealing with truly clueless management. The only solution is to be the manager. I’ve worked for people who actually did not know what a computer is. Period. This was extremely difficult. Nowadays most managers have some computer experience (even if they’re managing a shoe factory) or software development experience (if it’s a software or web house).

Often overlooked is the need for an application specialist. This can be a person who knows next to nothing about computers but is a real expert on the domain area, be it mathematics, accounting, the telephone network, aviation, whatever. Getting questions answered and the requirements right is more than half the battle.

This is because CS types, street programmers and hackers are often totally clueless about mathematics, accounting, the phone network, aviation, and so on.

In the US, but not Europe, Registered Nurses make more money than CS grads. I think the RN’s may have a harder job, too. And certainly more responsibility. I just thought you’d like to know.

Engineering and physics have turned out to be good backgrounds for software developers, but I think a CS or SE degree is better.

One area that does not help much is the part of “Software Engineering” that studies methods, methodology, CASE tools, flowchart generators, UML, CMM, waterfall versus agile, and on and on. They should, but they don’t. One reason is that in business, the structure of a project is dominated by budgets and schedules, and anything that contradicts that tends to get crushed. This especially true in aerospace firms and the like. It is less true in advanced software organizations like Google and Microsoft. I think tools and solutions in these areas are needed, I just think we don’t have them yet. Of course, they’ve been selling them for over 20 years.

Another area that hasn’t helped is Verificationism. This is the set of ideas to “Prove programs correct”. Someday we’ll have tools in the bigger IDE’s to help us do this, but that day is not here. And bigger IDE’s may require enormous computing resources. 100 cores, anyone? In a laptop?

Large teams of developers are hard to organize and manage. Communication is harder. Higher level languages enable development with smaller teams. Ruby, Python and Lisp lead the way, Perl too, but there has to be a next step, a higher level language that will enable even more functionality from manageable human resources.

I don’t believe that’s true. There’s no reason a mechanical engineer would be a better programmer than a CS major. If both get their degrees and then learn software development, most likely the CS major will blow the MechE out of the water.

I like the analogy of physics:bridges as CS:software. You could train a physicist to be a great bridge builder, but he won’t come out of his undergraduate degree being one! The same goes for the CS grad.

1. how to program (or, how to represent a conceptual problem in a programming language)
2. generalization (or, how not to copy & paste)
3. abstraction (or, how to find the most dumbed down way of communicating with some external module(s) that still allows us to achieve everything we want without being affected by major refactoring)

Now, these 3 problems take about 10 years-ish for a really smart dev. to fully crack. Let’s say, for arguments sake, a year for the first, a few years for the second, and the rest of the time for the third. The reason for that is because it requires much longer to get burned by screwing up abstraction then it does by screwing up generalization, and so there is a quicker feedback loop, and so learning happens at a quicker pace.

Now, there are shit loads of secondary skills — too many to iterate, but some include:

visually representing problem domains — knowing when to use them and which diagram types to use
time complexity analysis — being able to immediately appreciate when one algorithim is significantly faster than other (i.e. the difference between seconds, hours, and infinity) and learning not to waste time with insignificant optimizations except where they are shown to be on the critical path

For me, even though CompSci doesn’t create good programmers (and it certainly doesn’t have the 10 years to create great programmers), it is still a great curriculum because it encourages people to think pure thoughts (even if they’re not great at implementing them) and leaves the dirt and grime of real development for the on job. If you can remember the higher aspirational goals the CompSci people taught you, you’ll be less like to miss a trick, and forge ahead with an approach when a much more elegant one is available.

That’s basically it. The perfect example of this is all the donuts that use regexps for modifying code, and of course it’s full of bugs!!! If they didn’t remember their parser class at this point then WTF!