[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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