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This is not a good example of the two professions. Give the CS person hardware constraints, and he or she would design an equally good system. + Both people he
by psyklic 17y ago
This is not a good example of the two professions. Give the CS person hardware constraints, and he or she would design an equally good system.
+ Both people here are fundamentally asked to solve a hardware problem. Of course the CS person does not know how to design complicated hardware, so of course he or she will just stick in an arduino and write code ...
+ The CS person easily also could have said "it's a toaster" and then would have an almost identical solution to the EE (or vice versa). Keep in mind that EEs are limited because of manufacturing expenses ... again, we seem to be penalizing the CS majors because they would ignore hardware manufacturing costs!
+ Hardware is redesigned every few years to accommodate needs, just as software is.
- blackguardx 17y agoEEs write code too.
- Locke1689 17y agoI've always been a little interested in this. How competent are EEs at general programming? This is a serious question -- the only EEs I know that program wrote some really crappy assembly code for a robotics project I helped on (don't even get me started on their C).
- acgourley 17y agoThey probably say the same thing about your circuit design
- dagw 17y agoThe difference being that circuit design isn't part of the CS curriculum and most programmers wouldn't claim to know circuit design.
- stcredzero 17y agoActually, it is covered in some courses like "NAND to Tetris." It should be covered.
- GFischer 17y agoI agree that most wouldn't, but it depends. Over here (Uruguay), if you want to be an IT Engineer, you do have to learn to design circuits (and lots of other stuff like advanced calculus that the state deems required to give you a recognized "Engineer" degree). On the other hand, if you just want to code, you can study some Programming or Information Systems career and never learn advanced calculus or circuit design (I ended up with a degree in Information Systems myself, but I started the Engineering career and took a course on circuit design)
- dagw 17y agoBasically the same here in Sweden, Computer Engineering and Computer Science are two different degrees, and computer engineers have to learn hardware as well as software.
- ErrantX 17y agoDepends; because EE is a wide field. I know EE's who are mainly physicists and ones who are mainly programmers, for example. On my course, generally speaking, those of us interested in digital electronics were competent programmers. Ironically most of us were better than our CS peers (but only because cs at our Uni was not a great course) Don't forget their programming will have been taunt working on pics - so programs will tend to be terse and efficient (die to memory constraints) and employ lots of "hacks" (again due to memory/compiler constraints). Luckily I learned c before these habits :-p
- adityakothadiya 17y agoI'm a EE in a day job. I design processors. I write programs in hardware descriptive languages such as Verilog and Object Oriented languages such as SystemVerilog. I write Perl, Shell scripts too. Every day, I write code. I build websites in the part-time too. I write all PHP, CSS, MySQL, Javascript on my own, and build beautiful websites like http://shopalize.com http://shopalize.com. Every night, I write code too. So trust me, we're competent.
- stcredzero 17y agoSo trust me, we're lot competent. Ironically, this needs editing.
- plinkplonk 17y ago" > So trust me, we're lot competent. Ironically, this needs editing." Agreed ( I didn't say it) but so does this "I saw some EE student C code once" (from your earlier comment) ;-)
- stcredzero 17y agoSorry, but that's a valid sentence. Thanks for displaying your, "lot competent."
- plinkplonk 17y agoYou say "I saw some EE student C code once" is grammatical? How about "I saw some American woman English speak once"? ;-) I wonder who is "lot competent" here! Look, it is all right to make minor mistakes in grammar, especially if you are not a native speaker (the "lot comment" guy seemed Indian). I was just pointing out your hypocrisy in using that as a marker of competence and ask for editing, when you write more ill structured sentences yourself. He who would be a Grammar Nazi should first write grammatically correct sentences. Relax and let live.
- 17y ago
- psyklic 17y agoExactly. The EE and the CS major could both have added the kitchen sink to the spec. If the spec is already there, then both may produce similar solutions, depending on their hardware ability.
- stcredzero 17y agoI saw some EE student C code once. It seems there was a class-wide notion that indentation was optional, so everyone just left it out as a shortcut.
- nzmsv 17y agoI saw this kind of code more than once :) I was a TA for programming 101 for engineers. And yes, every time I asked a student to fix up the indenting before I could figure out why their program was broken they thought I was being difficult just to spite them. But you can't judge people just learning to program too harshly.
- eru 17y ago> But you can't judge people just learning to program too harshly. This just sounded much more cynical than it's probably meant.
- nzmsv 17y agoNice catch. The intended meaning was the "good" one.
- sketerpot 17y agoI'm a TA for such a class right now, and you're absolutely right. No matter how often I tell them to indent, they never get in the habit. Which is particularly galling considering that the text editor they're using has damn near foolproof auto-indent; it would literally take less than two seconds to fix their code, and yet they don't do it. "EE code" is another way of saying "probably total crap code". With some exceptions, of course. (And don't get me started on the people who cheat their way through most classes.)