Where have the universities gone? [LWN.net]

Where have the universities gone?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 1:56 UTC (Wed) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216)
In reply to: Where have the universities gone? by JoeF
Parent article: Where have the universities gone?

I sort of agree with you in that teaching any one flavor-of-the-month (in my distant youth: FORTRAN; in college: C and these days: Java) as the main course in CS is getting the cart before the horse. Personally I'd like the major to begin with a course in debugging, and then everything else is variations on that theme. :)

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Where have the universities gone?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 5:38 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

my High School CS teacher had it right,

the first class was an intro to BASIC (on TRS-80's), teaching you enough to be comfortable writing software.

the second class was advance algorithms, and half of the final was "here's a program (about a page and a half), it doesn't work, it has no documentation. figure out what it's supposed to do and fix it"

after that you went to to assembly and other things, starting by flipping switches on an Altair 8000 and moving on from there.

by the time I got to college the classes all seemed do boring, 10 min of useful info for each hour of class (if I was lucky)

Where have the universities gone?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 8:48 UTC (Wed) by jmoellers (subscriber, #29863) [Link]

> Personally I'd like the major to begin with a course in debugging, and then
> everything else is variations on that theme. :)

You're joking, right! The smiley is way too small.

Anyone getting involved in CS should start with a course in analysis and design, then follow that by a course in analysis and design, topped by a course in analysis and design.
Too many code is produced by starting to code and the throwing a debugger at it. Few "programmers" spend any time sitting down and *thinking* about the problem, *analyzing* the requirements, *desiging* a solution.
*Implementing* it in some language (C, C++, Java, Perl, Haskell) is the very last step. *Debugging* should hardly be necessary.
Oh yes, I almost forgot: please teach your students how to write. *Documentation* seems to out of fashion nowadays. BTW Writing down how and why the code works tremendously helps in getting it to do what it should do.

Where have the universities gone?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 0:28 UTC (Thu) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link]

Surely you're referring to The Mother Of All Debuggers: printf. I still shake my head when I fire up a GNOME app from the command line and see all the debug spam that splashes on my terminal.

Where have the universities gone?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 6:51 UTC (Thu) by jmoellers (subscriber, #29863) [Link]

> Surely you're referring to The Mother Of All Debuggers: printf

No, I'm not. I'm referring to the Mother Of All Debuggers: Brains(tm).
Too much software is written without it, too much software is produced without thoroughly thinking before writing and then it is tested and debugged into some semi-final state before being shipped.

I do agree that debugging is necessary in certain cases, but putting it first is like requiring every car owner to have a fully equipped garage.