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by CJefferson
3435 days ago
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I will look at your paper, but I think it depends what your target is, for students. Many of our students go on to do PhDs. For that an understanding of deep algorithmics is much more important than being able to use and distribute a library, or building larger applications. They need, in their field of student, to be able to reimplement and understand many important difficult algorithms, not (for example) put together some node.js libraries. However, there is a place for that kind of degree. Someone once said to me something which stuck with me: "You wouldn't try to merge a maths, and accounting degree, just because they both contain numbers", yet that's still what we do in computer science. |
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I just want to make sure, and state for everyone, that I'm far too lazy to do work that good. That's done by people much further along in their development of their profecian then I. Not my work just something that I think is good.
> Many of our students go on to do PhDs. For that an understanding of deep algorithmics is much more important than being able to use and distribute a library, or building larger applications
It depends on what their PhD or major is. Many CS majors here go into math and physics and they would have done better to learn how to write pythonic (or matlabic?) code and learn how to correcly design APIs. For instance, tonight I'm going to be rewriting a library from Python 2 to Python 3 and I have no way to tell if there's been any regression because of a lack of testing frameworks, consistentcy in APIs and lack of modularity. I'd be basically impossible for me to mock even single parts of this.
> They need, in their field of student, to be able to reimplement and understand many important difficult algorithms, not (for example) put together some node.js libraries.
I don't think left-pad is a good charictarization of my position here. I think that the hardest part of large scale software development is the architecture portion and that's mainly because very few people ever actually start large complex projects on their own and no universities offer courses in such a field that practicies that.
> However, there is a place for that kind of degree. Someone once said to me something which stuck with me: "You wouldn't try to merge a maths, and accounting degree, just because they both contain numbers", yet that's still what we do in computer science.
The moment you, or one of your coworkers, creates a major like that (Software Engineering and Developemnt or something) I'll be transfering over from my Computer Science degree. It's useless for anything but the name and the prestige that gets my foot in the door for a lot of very fun and interesting opportunities. I've had to hobcobble together everything I've needed to learn from a software perspective on reverse engineering, bare-metal systems devlopment, assembly, networking, game development, operating system development, web development, and many abstractions/patterns that go along with all of those. It was very difficult and I'd rather have given 30k/year over 4 years to a school who could teach me the "real" way from "professionals" and end up with a piece of extremely expensive framed paper that says my name and "degree" on it.
I'd also like for a school to hold my hand while exploring different paradigms.