[Edu-sig] Computer science without all that "heavy math" stuff...?

[Christopher A. Craig]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

"Alan Gauld" <agauld@crosswinds.net> writes:

> The difficulty is that the diversity is not mirrored in CS courses
> which are still largely focussed on software development as if that
> was all computing was about.

I don't think I've seen this.  The specializations offered at Georgia
Tech include networking, computational math, operating systems
(design), compiler design, database systems, and human-computer
interaction.  Now all of these also teach programming and basic
programming tenets (including objects, concurrent programming, etc),
but their higher level classes focus on things outside the area of
software development. 

> > java weenies and NT administrators 
> 
> I do find this a tad offensive to the many people 
> involved in the IT industry who are not programmers.

Yes, I apologize for that.  I named these as examples (bad ones) of
jobs for which most companies don't care if you have a background in
math or theory and not to insinuate that non-programmers (myself
included) were somehow inferior to programmers.

I was intending to say that if you wanted to go into a computing job
that does not require knowledge of math or underlying theory, perhaps
you would be better off without a university that stresses the
underlying theories of everything.  Perhaps I could have paid
attention more in my university writing classes. :-)

> > whined about how they didn't have a class in 
> > <insert popular language>, or they had to take 
> > "useless" classes in <insert theory>.
> 
> That happens on any course but the concern that I have here is that
> many CS courses are caving in to that by focussing purely on the
> commercial demands without providing the theory. We need both!

Agreed, and my beef with the author is that I think he was essentially
proposing that universities do exactly that.  

> I think thers a bit of that, but I also believe that the CS
> departments are too slow to broaden the range of computing subjects
> they teach.

I have never thought about this before, but it certainly is a valid
point.  I only have experience with one university, and I thought that
their curriculum was fairly well diversified, but even it did focus on
programming and so I can definitely see how this could cause a problem.
(though the author did a bad job describing this, if he even did
describe the same problem).

- -- 
Christopher A. Craig <com-nospam@ccraig.org>
"Going to school make a person educated, any more than going to a 
garage makes a person a car" Slashdot
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt

iEYEARECAAYFAjtYYS8ACgkQjVztv3T8pzsM9ACfQNDbDHlrn/c+XdxWpzZGPmEw
SzMAoJlHNkGSs1vznb9YSEd5nGTo/ZZe
=dDuX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----