[PLUG] Slightly OT: PCC software engineering program

[Jeff Schwaber]

On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 21:55, Jason Van Cleve wrote:
> On 05 Aug 2003 11:51:27 -0700
> Brian Beattie <beattie at beattie-home.net> wrote:
> 
> > Who or what industry uses "coders" who can't design?  or maybe I don't
> > know what a coder is.  In my 25 years of programming I don't think
> > I've ever done any work that did not require some design.  Though I've
> > been in the embedded systems/systems programming area.
> 
> A lot of app's can be slapped together without a formal design phase;
> they just take a lot longer and tend to be full of bugs.  When I was
> Director Of Tech' at a dot-com, I had a CS grad in my charge, who came
> in with a steamroller approach to coding:  just open a new file and
> start typing.  Very concrete thinker (no pun intended), but a very hard
> worker, so he got stuff done--albeit with much backtracking.  I've known
> a number of programmers like that, some even in the CSET program at PCC.
> Most of them don't go very far.

I've been deliberately ignoring this thread for a while, but you finally
got me. Maybe it's a troll, but either way, you are radically
misunderstanding Computer Science.

There's a reason large technical schools have both a computer science
and a computer programming (and information systems, etc) degree.

Computer science is a theoretical subject. It involves computation,
complexity, algorithm analysis (yes, design too), and many other things.
Parsing, language and compiler design, neural networks, artificial
intelligence, _these_ are the subjects of Computer Science. Software
engineering is usually relegated a secondary role in a theoretical
Computer Science degree, which you can view as good or bad, but it is.

But this is not to say that Computer Science degrees know nothing--what
they know is different. I have never yet met someone who graduated with
a Software Engineering, Computer Programming, or other similar degree
who could really analyze the time constraints of an algorithm, and
similarly, of code. Or who understood that there are tradeoffs between
algorithms, and why. Quicksort is the one people always use, even though
in some situations there are better algorithms. 

I am, of course, talking about people right out of college. People with
much experience have a totally different look at the subject.

I happen to be an anomaly--a CS major who can program. But I didn't
learn how to program from my school. Several of my friends graduated
from the CS degree lamenting their inability to program.

But man, we could talk about, and analyze stuff, that would make your
head spin.

Jeff