[cube13]

I think you're missing the entire point of what a Computer Science program is.

It's not to teach programming. It's to teach computing theory, algorithm design, etc. That's the reason that the top-level university programs are so heavy on theory. That just happens to fit with systems programmers(who somehow aren't software engineers... curious). It also fits with game programmers, which is where I think a lot of CS students want to go after they graduate.

I also disagree that there is any real good way to teach software engineering at this point in time. Unlike other disciplines such as Mechanical or even Electrical engineering with decades, even centuries of practical knowledge that has resulted in a lot of very strict best practices. Software engineering doesn't have that. Everything in the domain is extraordinarily fluid. Processes are changing rapidly. Tools as well. Even the end product we produce is vastly different from what it was 10 years ago. There simply isn't any good way to teach this subject in this environment short of on the job training. It's compounded with the fact that every software development house is different. Nobody has the exact same process, or uses the exact same tools. So teaching SE as a discipline really doesn't make much sense.

[jeffreymcmanus]

did you actually read the post? i actually pre-rebutted both of your arguments.

i understand quite well what a CS program is, since (as i pointed out in the post) i've been a student in three university CS programs and taught coding at a fourth.

i'm saying that most of what goes on in academic CS departments is not what we need as a society and it's not what most undergrads hope to get into when they enroll. most undergrads get into CS to write software, not to learn "theory" or "compiler design" (although, again, as i pointed out in the post, if this happens to be your bag, more power to you -- but this isn't really about you, it's about the mismatch between what university CS programs do and what people and society really want or need.)

software engineering is obviously teachable (i've been doing it for 20 years) and that's true even if you personally didn't have any good software engineering instructors or mentors. it looks like you and i are in agreement that rapid change in software engineering makes universities not the optimal place to teach software engineering (that was the point of my post). but it doesn't follow that because universities are bad at this, that software engineering is "not teachable".

[ChuckMcM]

Interesting side discussion.

I do thing cube123 read your post, and I do think a valid conclusion from reading your post is that you have missed the point of what a CS program is.

I suspect that this comes from your own history, and part from the way in which CS 'grew up' as a discipline.

The point of your posting is that being employed as a programmer, and learning programming is not what a Computer Science degree is about. Try getting an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering, its similar in that you have lots of theory on lots of things but little practical experience.

The leap you make which causes me to discard your argument is this one, "but this isn't really about you, it's about the mismatch between what university CS programs do and what people and society really want or need." You have taken on the role of speaking for society and yet you haven't successfully made a case that you can accurately represent what society wants.

You can make an argument that there is a need for a training program between high school and employment that teaches people how to write programs to solve problems. You can call that Computer Engineering, Applied Programming, Programming Technology, what ever. Such programs exist, both in the 'for profit' University world and elsewhere. You can argue that such programs should be structured more along the various processes for producing reliable, testable code, and you do some of that in your education project (always great to put your money where your mouth is like that).

But the opportunity to teach folks who 'just want to code' does not disqualify CS as being a valid course of study, just like 'Accounting' doesn't disqualify 'Mathematics' as a course of study. So your central thesis that 'more universities should shut down their CS programs' fails the 'sniff' test.

Now if you said 'More universities should offer applied programming type degrees' and used your points about how it is what many people want to do. That is a reasonable conversation to have, do we want to elevate what have been things like ITT Technical College programs into a more general purpose degree program? Something between 'JavaSchool' and 'CS' ? I can see arguments for and against.

But if you are going to blurt out things like "Most undergraduates and professional actually want to learn applied software engineering, not 'computer science'" you really should try to develop some foundation for that claim. What evidence do you offer that this claim is valid? Some study on college exit exams, some survey of recent CS graduates? A self selecting poll on Reddit? Its all well and good to wonder if most folks just want to code, but to use it as a claim in your argument that Universities should restructure their CS programs, and expecting your readers to 'buy in' to that requires that you provide some basis for making that claim.

Your post makes a bunch of claims, four of them in big bold font, for which your provide no supporting evidence or structure at all around why the reader should believe them. Because of that your message is lost.

I agree with you that it is an interesting topic and as we've moved 'programming' into a more general skill requirement based on the explosion of 'programmable' devices, you might be more successful making the argument that we need to offer a better high school programming class. (much like Typing was offered in the 70's as a way to provide a generally useful skill to High School students).

[glogla]

Just a terminology note: 'Computer Engineering' is already existing term for the discipline of making computers -- designing CPUs and building hardware in general (our CE has strong security focus, so they do lot of RFID ASIC stuff, and some FPGA crypto stuff) and low level programming like compiler backends (SPARC register windows are pretty!), microcontrollers and interfacing with other hardware too. And whatever Hennessy and Patterson are doing.

So you shouldn't name gutted code monkey courses Computer Engineering :)

[kls]

My problem with your position is that what you are proposing does not require a 4 year degree. I think a 6 month to one year vocational program would be of more advantage to a student than a 4 year degree in what amounts to a vocational education. The problem with this, is that no one respects a vocational education and no one views it as a competent replacement for a 4 year degree (even if the student is better prepared for the job). So it is a catch 22, you are wasting the students time with a 4 year vocational degree, as the stuff they learn in year one is out of date and the perception of anything shorter is that it is a fly by night education. I don't disagree with your premise that students are not being served, but maybe the answer is improving vocational education and the perception there and not in butchering university academia, the latter has been tried and was not very successful.

[jeffreymcmanus]

i agree that what i am proposing does not require a 4-year degree. i don't think that most undergraduates should spend four years in school.

"no one respects a vocational education" is cargo cult thinking. elite universities don't write world-changing software, educated, motivated people do.

i come not to butcher academia. as one of the least reformable institutions in our society, i'm pretty much indifferent to academia.

[cube13]

>elite universities don't write world-changing software, educated, motivated people do.

Mosaic, which was the precursor to Netscape and IE, came from a project at NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

[eli_gottlieb]

Oh, an industry supremacist.

[jeffreymcmanus]

Uh, no. Did you even read the post?

[eli_gottlieb]

You seem to quite definitely be stating a belief that industry is more valuable to society than academia.

[zeteo]

There's no engineering without a solid theoretical background. You want to do civil engineering, they'll make sure you thoroughly understand Newton's laws; electrical, Kirchhoff's. And that's just the start. In fact, you're much better prepared to build big bridges if all you've studied is theoretical physics than if you had personally built a crossing over every ditch on campus.

[jeffreymcmanus]

Wait -- no engineering is possible? None at all? Really? Then how do you explain the success of high school dropout Benjamin Franklin?

The point of my post is not that theory is worthless (which I call out several times in the post). It's really that there is more than one way to learn this stuff and that most undergraduates pick out a sub-optimal path for cargo-cult reasons (such as the "halo effect" of elite universities which I also called out in the post).

[zvrba]

> most undergrads get into CS to write software, not to learn "theory" or "compiler design"

The flip side is also that an undergraduate enrolls into a CS class, discovers (so it's not their bag before enrollment) that "compiler design" is far more exciting and intelectually challenging than developing typical business/CRUD apps, only to find out after graduation that such jobs barely exist. Yes, let's dispense with academic CS departments.

Maybe the message you tried to convey is that attending mediocre CS courses is much worse than attending good SE courses. That I agree with, but I do not agree that SE should be totally devoid of theory.

[cube13]

>i'm saying that most of what goes on in academic CS departments is not what we need as a society and it's not what most undergrads hope to get into when they enroll. most undergrads get into CS to write software, not to learn "theory" or "compiler design" (although, again, as i pointed out in the post, if this happens to be your bag, more power to you -- but this isn't really about you, it's about the mismatch between what university CS programs do and what people and society really want or need.)

I don't think that catering to what undergrads want is a good thing, at all. The majority of undergrads are 17 to 21 year old kids that really don't know what they want to do. They don't know the industries they want to get into. I certainly didn't, and my experiences at UIUC turned me away from going into game programming to a totally different space. And I wasn't a good programmer out of college. I was pretty terrible. But work has taught me a LOT, most of which I wouldn't understand without the theory basis.

>software engineering is obviously teachable (i've been doing it for 20 years) and that's true even if you personally didn't have any good software engineering instructors or mentors. it looks like you and i are in agreement that rapid change in software engineering makes universities not the optimal place to teach software engineering (that was the point of my post). but it doesn't follow that because universities are bad at this, that software engineering is "not teachable".

Like I said in my post, the difficulty of teaching programming and SE in general is that it's changing at an incredibly rapid pace. Languages have evolved. C/C++ were the de-facto languages for a while, then Java gained quite bit of popularity. Recently, C# seems to have taken a large majority of the mindshare.

20 years ago, a lot of SE practices were highly structured, highly documented(and highly wasting of time) systems. IBM's RUP is one example. 10-15 years ago, less structured systems like XP started showing up, and gained quite a bit of popularity. In the last few years, Agile has become very popular. I learned about RUP and XP in my SE courses, but the place I work at doesn't use any of the above.

So what would the program teach? Just the most current, up to date stuff? Or would you try to teach a bit of everything?

The problem with teaching just the brand new shiny is that you end up with the Java mills from the 90's. They're not teaching programming. They're teaching Java. And it may be worthless in a year. While that may just be what the student wants, it's not what society needs.

[jeffreymcmanus]

> I don't think that catering to what undergrads want is a good thing, at all

that's not what i proposed at all. what i propose is to bring curriculum into the 21st century, and to call out the fact that cargo cult thinking and poor organization on the part of universities are standing in the way of that.

[10098]

> bring curriculum into the 21st century,

I don't quite understand what you mean by that. Dijkstra's algorithm is the same both in 20 and 21st centuries, ditto for red-black trees. Are you proposing universities should be teaching iOS programming and web development with ruby instead of data structures and complexity theory?

[jeffreymcmanus]

Not instead of. In addition to.

[10098]

I don't think they should be teaching that at all. It's a bigger waste of time than teaching differential equations. At least diff. equations are there forever and might one day come in handy if you end up writing some software for modeling physical processes. Ruby, on the other hand, will be replaced by some other trendy language in a few years. Plus, if you already know a couple of programming languages with different paradigms, picking up Ruby (or Python, or PHP, or Java) is really easy to do on your own, you can start writing production code in matter of weeks.