tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2310459287893430770.post1432359699219478371..comments2008-08-07T18:02:04.862-07:00Sid G.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05051549143586861389noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2310459287893430770.post-17301303151604303122008-08-07T18:02:00.000-07:002008-08-07T18:02:00.000-07:00Yes, I agree with your description of the 95% programmers, the problem is that you are describing the MIS majors, not the CS majors. That is why we have two different fields in the first place. If you want to write business software, do a major in MIS or perhaps a Software Engineering major, if your school offers it. On the other hand, if you want to study Artificial Intelligence, Complexity Theory, Automata Theory, etc., etc., then major in Computer Science. I hate it when people keep trying to push CS into a Software Development curriculum. I've now taken classes at three schools, two were glorified Java schools and the other was a more traditional program. I hated the Java schools because everyone treated CS as a very long course in programming. If you want to learn how to program, teach yourself, its not hard. At the traditional school, on the other hand, I was surrounded by what I would refer to as scholars, in other words, students who got into CS because they were more interested in the academic purity of the topic and the rigor than they were in learning to write a program in Java.vthakrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06275431205861025206noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2310459287893430770.post-79297600124913091492008-08-07T16:08:00.000-07:002008-08-07T16:08:00.000-07:00Greg, I'm afraid that is 100% the fault of the teacher and not the curriculum. Making people aware of something and teaching basics is quite far apart. For anything to be able to be part of the curriculum it needs to have credit assigned to it. For anything to have credit assigned to it, there must be the possibility to assert that the student has learned/mastered anything. <BR/><BR/>Unless your willing to accept(you shouldn't) tests that are basicly memory tests, you need to cover more material then time would permit. You can only squeeze in so much in those few years.<BR/><BR/>It's up to the teachers to give pointers as they teach the other subjects.Michael Bhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02255869398034952499noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2310459287893430770.post-80494555407473274832008-08-06T22:49:00.000-07:002008-08-06T22:49:00.000-07:00It's not about the elite. It's about the educating the rank and file having some idea of the extent of things they don't know. The people who _won't_ find out about the rest of programming world (or even its existence!) if they aren't specifically made aware of it during their education. It doesn't matter whether they'll ever use those skills directly, they'll be far better programmers for knowing what's out there and where to look if they need something beyond their experience.Greghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07637024036051297719noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2310459287893430770.post-64816113643190501182008-08-06T14:06:00.000-07:002008-08-06T14:06:00.000-07:00My experience is that the elite are self-educating. A favorite pastime of the elite is decrying the state of the average student and the curriculum. I should know, that's what I did through college. I walked into every class with a chip on my shoulder (usually an obscure processor that you had to program in assembly because there weren't any better tools for it. ;)<BR/><BR/>Now I have a better appreciation for what the standard curriculum does. Just getting the result of producing a productive average programmer, as you describe, is difficult enough and laudable enough in itself. The purpose of undergraduate studies isn't to produce super-hackers. Besides, if they did produce that many super-hackers there wouldn't be enough work for all of them. Then the lament would be all the poor super-hackers coming out of college and the best job they can find is writing PHP for some corporation's web pages.Mark A. Graybillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05472603072142005189noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2310459287893430770.post-69437774968442104272008-07-31T17:47:00.000-07:002008-07-31T17:47:00.000-07:00I couldn't agree more. My 2nd or 3rd year of college, I spent about 200 hours writing a lisp interpreter *in* lisp that would take *lisp* code and transform it into a useless assembly language defined by the professor. I learned some interesting things but nothing that I've ever used at work. In retrospect, it would have been great if we'd done it in ruby, python or javascript (java doesn't have the 'eval' functionality required for the incestuous interpreter we had to build)Claudehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09151475395414687678noreply@blogger.com