

Hackers and Fighters - dpapathanasiou
http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/hackers.htm

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Tichy
I must admit I don't consider learning a programming language something a
university is supposed to teach you. They should teach you about concepts, and
perhaps offer some optional seminars or workshops interested students could
use for learning a programming language of choice.

Frankly, a "programming language" degree from a university would devaluate the
value of the degree in my opinion (ie if a student would get points for
knowing a programming language). Might as well just go for Microsoft
Certification.

I also don't see why they have to agree on a standard programming language for
the whole CS department. Why not let each teacher do their own thing, and let
the students decide (teacher insists on Pascal -> students won't attend the
lecture).

~~~
umjames
The problem with most CS courses (and any course in general) is that the class
is taught to the lowest common denominator of students. Yes, a class can have
pre-requisites, but the first required CS classes for freshmen cannot.

Some colleges don't require any previous computer experience to become a CS
major, just as long as you can pay the tuition. In such cases, you can't
assume any basic programming knowledge without turning the intro courses into
programming language courses in some base language.

But I agree with you on the last part about not having one language for every
course in the department.

~~~
jamesbritt
> the class is taught to the lowest common denominator

Not the highest common factor?

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acgourley
I think academia would generally respond that CS is about the concepts not the
syntax.

Universities need to do a better job raising street fighters, but I don't
think it needs to be through course load. There needs to be more programming
competitions, more open ended assignments, more CS related clubs and projects,
etc. Sure not everyone will participate, but if they don't, they are never
going to be good programmers anyway.

And lets face it, if universities had more ways to allow students to implement
fun things like games or robots (or startups), they would certainly be more
willing to spend their extra cycles out of class learning implementation.

~~~
jey
I totally agree. As acgourley said, not everyone will participate, but these
sorts of programs would give a solid opportunity to develop more practical
skills to people who aren't willing to take initiative to learn it entirely on
their own. I'm strongly opposed to the idea that the Algorithms or Theory of
Computation class should be traded in for a course on .NET GUI Development,
Ruby on Rails, or some other API-du-jour.

University is about learning concepts and theory, not just a few programming
languages and APIs. The real problem is that trade schools are unfairly
stigmatized, and people who want to learn to be a programmer without wading
through all the algorithms and theory have to still go to a University for
social reasons when they'd be better served by a trade school.

~~~
acgourley
if it isn't the street fighter himself...

