[PLUG] Slightly OT: PCC software engineering program

[Jason Van Cleve]

On 05 Aug 2003 21:40:55 +0000
Jeff Schwaber <freyley at gmx.net> wrote:

> several of your posts that you worship at the gate of the Design
> Document, and the Plan, and that anyone who jumps in without a formal
> specification written is a bad programmer. Maybe you haven't been
> quite that extreme, but that's the direction you've been going with
> your statements.

You're taking my statements too far.  My point was that design is a
critical skill for software engineers (as Mr. Beattie would seem to
agree; and in both senses of the word "critical"), and that some of them
fail to learn and use it as they should.  Unless you believe design is
altogether needless, which you apparently do not, then nothing
I've said could be taken as fanaticism, and there's no need for the
antagonization of a religious metaphor.

> Software Engineering, when in fact the chief reason why Software
> Engineering is barely included in the curriculum of Computer Science
> is that, accurately enough, Computer Scientists are skeptical that
> Software Engineers _know_ anything. They all believe something, but

This appears false.  As you yourself have already pointed out, the
domain of CS is theoretical, hence it is not as concerned with teaching
the practical skills of development.  The software course at PCC was
largely practical, and design was emphasized, quite practically, as a
means of writing software efficiently, not as the Way Of Enlightenment.
It seems to me that the practitioners of CS would have little to say
against that approach, and that software engineering is secondary for
them only because of the scope of their domain.

--Jason Van Cleve