Steve Jones - SSC Editor (5/13/2014)
call.copse (5/13/2014)
I do think there should be a safe environment where students can learn the theory without being overly concerned about practicalities - this could be the first year of the degree. More practical exposure after that would ensure that students are not intimidated by real things and doing real work - while the theory continues.I guess here there is a problem with what the practical stuff might be - Java, .Net, T-SQL, Ruby on Rails, something less directly practical? My understanding is that Java is most common on undergrad courses, .Net is felt to be more sullied and 'vocational'. Still, as long as they stay away from PHP and Perl...
That's interesting. however, do we want the first or last year? When I started in CS, the first year was hard, really hard with theory and it weeded out people quickly. Seemed like a good way to raise quality.
However since then, I've thought that there are people that can learn to program and do well, but don't need the theory on how a quicksort works.
Having worked with a fair variety of programming types I can say weeding is a good plan - unfortunately there are not enough programmers with the right skills here right now. I'm trying to train up as many as I can but it's not quick work. Thing is even the best of programmers with the best of intentions can seem to leave behind code that is a little incoherent.
Of course there are a variety of roles to fill - I don't really even know how to categorise UI programmers who need to produce quite complicated code, but such types may well not really need sorting algorithms in their box of tricks. We are using a fair few more design oriented types who can do various types of fluid (responsive) layout. I think this is a relatively new role between design and back end programmer if you like, I'm sure there are numerous other types emerging. No mould will fit all cases I guess.