At 11:05 25/10/2004 -0400, Troy Rollins wrote:
As usual, I take on the role of devil's advocate.
Good role to take - someone always should do so.
This thread makes me wonder what the goal is. It would seem to me that the CS students have every right to "roll their eyes." Aren't these people expected to go find programming jobs when they get out of school? They are more likely to find a want-ad for programming in Sanskrit than Transcript. I don't doubt they are looking more seriously at M$ tools like .NET. They are probably hoping to be employed, and to leave college with skills which make them employable. If they are rolling their eyes, I would say they probably have a good sense of reality.
They're undergrads in a CS degree course. They're not in a six-month vocational course to teach them to program. They should be getting an education to set them up for 20+ years in computing and computational science - not just to help them find their first job.
A CS degree should (IMO) contain at least as much theory of computation, as much algorithm and program design issues, as much GUI considerations, as much .... etc. as it does how to write programs in this year's or this decade's fashionable language.
Of course, I say this in my role as crusty old man who still thinks that the most useful course he did in high school was Latin, and the most useful in undergrad was Logic and Philosophy of Science :-)
Rev, and the like are tools better suited to K-12 learning, and independent "problem solvers" (like most of us) than college CS majors preparing for the job market.
I have to wonder if this whole thing is meant to serve the teachers and acedemia life - because Rev is easy to teach, rather than the students, who will likely be mighty PO'd if convinced and coerced into spending time and money learning techniques and syntax which simply don't apply in the business world outside of the very fringe.
I'm not debating the power that Rev can have... heck, I use it. BUT, it isn't going to help me land a job at a corporation's IT department. Unless this course is something like "Alternative programming techniques 101" and an elective, similar to "music appreciation", I'd seriously have to wonder who it was aimed to benefit.
"won't help you land a job in a corporate ..."
I don't know about that - there are corporations seeking Python programmers to work in Java - because the extra breadth has a positive correlation with future productivity. In the past 12 years or so, I have hired around 30 or 40 new graduates (divided between US and UK); admittedly most of them have been Master or rather than Bachelor degree holders - but even so, the biggest difficulty for me was finding something to differentiate them. I wouldn't much care *which* other languages they knew about - but I'd definitely be more interested in someone who could describe a number of computer languages, and say something intelligent (or even just convincing :-) about the differences between them and why different problems were better handled by different tools - that was one of my standard "interview questions" that I asked most candidates. That's for hiring into a software development / engineering group - those looking to go into IT may have different experiences.
-- Alex.
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