Quote of the week

Posted Aug 18, 2011 5:28 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
Parent article: Quote of the week

The names getting longer is less a problem of naming and more a problem of someone not understanding how to architect software. Your code should be naturally composable rather than requiring permutations of every possible composition.

... kind of obvious, and yet most schools don't teach this. Because they teach CS instead of software engineering. So college kids learn functional composition but never learn how to actually apply it in real-world contexts.

Le sigh.

Quote of the week

Posted Aug 18, 2011 8:53 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know what those classes do for real, but based on some of their names they might not be doing any more useful work than something like this:

for (int i = 0; i < array.size; i ++) {
array[i] = array[i].toLowerCase();
}

If so, it's another case of somebody constructing elaborate architectures for accomplishing trivial tasks. Giving more flexible tools to do this sort of stuff doesn't help: the key insight is to not do any of this stuff.

Quote of the week

Posted Aug 18, 2011 11:36 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

As far as I understand, it's more complex than that, as it builds a view of a collection.

Now, I have a similar problem with naming. If I try to use descriptive names I often end up with stuff like 'NullResultPropagatingSession'. And I don't really know how to make such names to be shorter.

Quote of the week

Posted Aug 18, 2011 10:14 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (3 responses)

>most schools don't teach this. Because they teach CS instead of software engineering

[NB: When you say 'school', I assume you mean 'university' since I've heard Americans use it that way a lot. But possibly I've misunderstood you and you really do mean children's education]

To be fair, if you choose a CS course instead of an engineering course, you should know what you're getting. I wouldn't blame a university for not having much engineering in its maths courses, and it's pretty much the same issue.

I'm not certain that's the problem at hand though - I'm struggling to imagine how you could learn the concept of functional composition in even the most abstract theoretical way and still come up with the examples given.

Quote of the week

Posted Aug 18, 2011 18:07 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

if you want to learn programming, there isn't a computer engineering department, just a computer science department

Quote of the week

Posted Aug 19, 2011 4:43 UTC (Fri) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link] (1 responses)

At my university there was both a CS department and an ECE department, Electrical and Computer Engineering. ECE majors were required to take some core hardware classes (e.g. circuit theory and intro to solid state), but afterwards we could focus on computer engineering (computer architecture, UNIX/Linux, data structures, OS programming, computer vision...). Plenty of opportunities to learn programming.

Quote of the week

Posted Aug 25, 2011 22:16 UTC (Thu) by wtanksleyjr (subscriber, #74601) [Link]

That's exactly how UCSD was... But as a CS major, whenever the CS and ECE cohorts met in a single class it immediately became clear what sort of class it was -- if it was electronics, ECE would ace the grade curve; if it was programming, CS would. The fun part was when EEs would come in to a later part of a series in electronics and CRUSH both cohorts.

In summary... Unless you want to write device drivers, you'll probably be better challenged taking CS courses than ECE ones; your competition will be a lot more serious.

At least at UCSD.

Mixed majors are a different thing; but again, if you can get into the CS courses you'll get more of a programming challenge.

-Wm