[Edu-sig] Migrating to Projects - Was: Low Enrollments - programming as anti-intellectualism
Trent Oliphant
trent at oliphant.org
Fri Nov 4 20:31:03 CET 2005
Toby Donaldson wrote:
>
> One thing CS departments could do is offer service-oriented software
> engineering courses. It's clear that many people nowadays learn to
> program on their own, and run into well-known difficulties once their
> programs get too big. Those people would probably appreciate and
> benefit from a software engineering course, especially if was
> platform/lanuage neutral.
This brings up an interesting discussion point, one in which I would be
extremely interested personally: How do you help students (or yourself) move
from writing scripts, functions, classes, modules etc. to writing a larger
project. I am actually at that stage right now in my personal learning curve.
That curve seems extremely steep.
I have looked at pythoncard for example - because I thought it could help with
that curve. Maybe it is just me and the way that I think, but it doesn't seem
to really help with that.
Is that part of the reason for the perception that Python is not approriate for
large scale projects - because there are no tools that make the job realistic?
The discussion of CS departments and whether they are becoming mere technical
schools is fascinating. However, could we (or are there) tools available that
would make programming more available to more people (if not everyone).
As much as I may have opinions on Microsoft and their products. I think that
Access is an excellent model of allowing people to create "Applications" without
having to already know how to do it. Its big drawback is it doesn't allow you
to get beyond the constrains of the program. Sure you can move the data - but
the application - the interface, much of the business logic, etc - is stuck in
Access. Plus that is only for database based projects.
I know it may seem that I am talking about an IDE - but even those (at least the
ones available for Python that I have seen) assume that you already know how to
do a project. So I get overwhelmed. I want them to work for me - but they just
haven't yet.
I have thought about writing my own - because I think there is a real need for
it. I am a lone programmer - entirely self taught - and this is a daunting
task. I feel confident that I could handle programming most of the individual
components that would make up the project, but I don't even know where to start
and there appears to be nothing out there to help me learn that.
Trent Oliphant
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