Where have the universities gone? [LWN.net]

Where have the universities gone?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 8:48 UTC (Wed) by jmoellers (subscriber, #29863)
In reply to: Where have the universities gone? by allesfresser
Parent article: Where have the universities gone?

> 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.

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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.