Subj : Re: Are programmers like this in the real world?
To   : comp.programming
From : Matthias Kaeppler
Date : Sun Jul 24 2005 12:46 pm

Matthias Kaeppler wrote:
> In the short-lived
> world of IT it is (or shouldn't) be the intention of a university to 
> teach certain tools or languages, but rather the concepts behind them.

That should of course read: "... it is /not/ (or should not) be the 
intention..."

Sorry.

Let me say a couple of more words to this problem, because I indeed 
think it /is/ a problem. Our CS study course in the first 4 semesters is 
organized like this:

Besides lectures dealing with computer theory and math and some lectures 
about system software and computer architecture, there is a line of 
lectures called "Development of Software Systems I-III" (freely 
translated) which comprehensively deal with most central aspects of 
developing software from requirements engineering, analysis and design 
up to implementation and testing.

Of course it's not that detailed as it gets later on in the study 
course, but of course it's there to cover the fundamentals. This course 
ends in a software project which has to be realized in the 4th semester. 
We had to implement parts of the TPC-W specification for a benchmarking 
system for commercial online platforms (see www.tpc.org).

Likely, this also covers doing programming where Java was the leading 
tool to do that, and core concepts of this language were also 
introduced. /However/, if you would want to really get proficient with 
Java, hearing this lecture was /not/ enough. For me, that's not a 
problem, because I like programming and do quite some programming in my 
spare time (not in Java though).

However, this indeed /does/ become a problem for those CS students who 
are not really attracted to programming per se. Those people had severe 
problems in the 4th semester where we had to develop that software 
system under a harsh dead line; especially in the implementation phase 
it became clear that they were lacking decent programming skills.

So, this may be an explanation why there are also quite some people 
holding CS degrees but tend to deliver poor code. It's because at quite 
some universities programming per se is /not/ the focus.

IMHO this /is/ quite problematic, not least because it gives computer 
scientists a bad name in the industry.

-- 
Matthias Kaeppler

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