I couldnn't agree more. Sure a CS undergrad or Masters won't make you
proficient in any language but it should give a good grounding in basic
constructs and generalized best practices that would be applicable in many
programming languages. I do think this is one area where many cf developers
could use a little extra experience.
I have learned a great deal from my masters program. It has focused on good
basics in systems analysis and design etc and I still have a year left to
go. I am also looking forward to the database design and network design
courses.
But I'm getting frustrated when I try and come back to other cf programmers
at work (I have been doing cf for 10 years now myself). They have no idea
what I mean when I try and discuss functional decomposition or object
cohesion and coupling, or the differences between relational databases and
object oriented ones for example.
I know its expensive and time consuming but I still feel a good number of
developers would do better if they could step back from the language and get
a handle on some sound good programming concepts.
Elizabeth Alger
HITSS contract
-Original Message-
From: Dave Watts [mailto:dwa...@figleaf.com]
Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 5:09 PM
To: cf-talk
Subject: Re: Education
Just looking at ColdFusion alone, we've had a new major version every
year for the past 4 years. Which means that if you had a 4 year college
course that included CF prepared in 2006, it would be outdated by 3
major versions by this year when the students graduated. I expect a
similar kind of phenomena with other languages that have been
traditionally (or recently) included in Comp-Sci courses like Java or
C++. Or for any of the .NET technologies that Microsoft promote.
Personally I lean more in the direction of thinking that a comp-sci
degree isn't very useful in software engineering, but that a cognitive
science degree would help an awful lot.
Again, computer science is not programming. A good CS curriculum isn't
about specific technologies, it's about foundational knowledge - how
computers work, algorithms, etc, etc. In my experience, not enough CF
programmers understand that stuff as well as they should. I'm in that
category myself - I've been reading CS books for the last decade or
so, trying to catch up to that basic level of foundational knowledge.
While a typical CS program will teach one or more programming
languages, the languages themselves are tangential to the actual
content of the course, and could easily be replaced by other
languages. It doesn't really matter how current the actual language
is, for that purpose.
And as far as CF goes, while CF has lots of new bells and whistles
every couple of years, the introductory CF course authored by Adobe
changes very little, and is pretty similar to what it was when CF 3
came out. The advanced course changes quite a bit, on the other hand.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
Fig Leaf Software provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized
instruction at our training centers in Washington DC, Atlanta,
Chicago, Baltimore, Northern Virginia, or on-site at your location.
Visit http://training.figleaf.com/ for more information!
~|
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