On Oct 11, 2004, at 11:45 AM, Derek M Jones wrote:
Then there are the quality of life issues. Forget terrorists, think of the
mayhem that undertrained programmers can cause. I think we need to
keep people away from programming computers.
If the goal is to have more quality programming, then having fewer people program isn't a workable strategy. It would be if we had some way of detecting who was going to be a success software developer and who wouldn't, but such aptitude tests haven't worked yet. So, the best way that we can end up with more quality programmers is to get more people overall programming, and skim off the best to become software developers.
I agree with your other message, Derek: We don't want all programmers to be software developers. We want a variety of kinds of programmers. The reality is, whether we share that wish or not, that's what's happening. Ethnographic studies, like Bonnie Nardi's very nice "A Small Matter of Programming," show that there are end-user programmers in industry, and they tend to stratify. For example, in Excel-using companies, there are people who build DLLs, those that build macros, those that build spreadsheets, and those that just use others' spreadsheets. When I was at Bell Labs and Bellcore, I was part of programming team who built graphing and database tools that others (mathematicians, statisticians, electrical engineers) would use through shell scripts.
If we as CS educators declare that we're only interested in software developers, then I fear that (a) we're cutting computer science out of the majority of interesting programming going on and (b) we're doing the programmers-but-not-quite-developers a disservice by not helping them understand what they're doing and how to do it well.
Mark
__________ Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing/GVU Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 Collaborative Software Lab, http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~mark.guzdial/
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