On 3/16/06, Paul Lussier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> IMHO, the schools should teach the important aspects >> of computer programming ... > > My understand is that this is exactly how MIT has structured their CS > curriculum.
All good and true, I'm sure, but let's also not loose sight of the fact that different people (students) are after different things. A lot of people just want to learn a little bit about some tool they have to use. They don't want to invest in an "education" on general theory. A CS student should learn that, stuff, absolutely, but this thread started off talking about office suites. But most of this applies equally well to office suites, OSes, programming languages, and any number of other things. A lot of people don't know much more than how to open a file in Word, and that's probably all they need. These people *can* probably use OpenOffice.org without significant retraining, too, because "File -> Open" works the same way in both. Many of these people will complain if presented with OOo, though, because it looks different. They also probably complained when presented with Windows XP or Office 2003, for the same reasons. I know, I've been there. Sometimes what is needed is the boss saying, in effect, "Get over it". Of course, the boss is not infrequently one of these people, too, which makes things more difficult. Showing the boss the budget sheet (BIGNUM for MS Office licenses, zero for OOo licenses) may help, there. Users with a significant investment in knowing how to use a given tool are a bigger problem. General theory is definitely the right way to educate people who need that kind of investment. However, that's often not what gets done -- the nature of many people seems to be to learn the steps needed to use a tool, not learning general theory. And don't forget that even general theory only gets you so far. Sure, techniques are the same in most any language, but learning all the details of a language still require significant investment. For example, I know one of the big reasons Paul Lussier's shop uses Perl and not Python is that everyone knows Perl already. This is the "installed base" problem, and it's huge. Let's face it, a word processor is not *that* complicated a tool, no matter which way you spin it. Re-training somebody is not that big a deal. But re-training *ten thousand* somebodies is. Trivial times many equals significant. There's no easy way around this problem. One has to be forward thinking enough to realize that eventually, not having to pay Microsoft $400/person every five years just to run Word will eventually pay off. Choosing between expensive and free should be easy. Choosing between two free tools (e.g., Perl vs Python) is a much trickier problem. That's a can of worms I'm not going to open right now. :) There's also another issue, which is that very often, things don't get done the right way. I know plenty of people who spend all day in MS Word but don't know how to use it properly for large documents. Of course, the design of Word sucks horribly for that, so it becomes very hard to use it properly in those cases, but even so, a little training would go a long way there. But it doesn't happen. Even the users often resist it. I've seen the same with programming. It's amazing how many people who don't know how to design software are employed designing software. I don't have any answer to this one, other than "people suck". :) -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
