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While at Texas Instruments, around 1976, I was in the group trying to move the company to use a more modern programming language. I had learned Pascal while in

by todd8 8y ago

While at Texas Instruments, around 1976, I was in the group trying to move the company to use a more modern programming language. I had learned Pascal while in grad school by studying Wirth’s compiler source so I was happy to be in this department. We had built a commercial, extended, Pascal that ran on the company’s own hardware, microprocessors though minicomputers. The goal was to move the COBOL, Fortran, JOVIAL, and assembly language programmers in the company to Pascal. My department built the compiler and because I had taught programming in grad school I ended up being one of the evangelists that taught innumerable one week crash courses to the company’s engineers, business programmers, and software people. It was actually a really fun job and I met a large number of people that worked in the company’s various branches. I discovered that there is no better way to learn every facet of something than to teach it, more than once, to grumpy students sceptical of the new fangled concepts. A couple years later I was back in grad school again, still programming in Pascal. It was interesting to realize that most fellow PhD students that go straight through aren’t really good programmers and don’t understand software engineering. (This was a long time ago so it’s probably very different now. CS students own their own computers and are able to program much more than we could.) I remember Pascal fondly like some friends remember their first car. Like cars though, the new languages are really much better (safer, faster, more reliable, etc).

0xffff2 8y ago
>This was a long time ago so it’s probably very different now. As a recent CS undergrad and current software engineer in a research organization, I don't think it is. Most of the people I worked with on group assignments in my undergrad had, at best, a limited understanding of their prior coursework, much less any knowledge acquired on their own time. Furthermore, CS PhDs in my org don't know anything about software engineering and mostly don't care. They are really here to do math. They don't need to write good code because I can transform their mediocre (from an SE perspective) code that handles the base case of a complex algorithm into better code that is maintainable, handles error cases and integrates with the rest of our codebase.
Msurrow 8y ago
I don’t think its different for CS grads today, and I don’t it is supposed to be. CS at a university is not meant to educate software devs; software dev is just one tool of a CS researcher — and depending on research field software dev/languages can be the object og research. A CS grad at uni is meant to teach the student to do CS research, ie. stay in academia. But I think CS grads are very popular for software dev positions, because of their very heavy theoretical knowledge within the field, which provides the basis for becomming a very good software dev.
xtrimsky1234 8y ago
It's not different for CS grads today. Half of my class was playing Quake 3 during classes :/. But one thing my school did perfectly, is force 3 months of internships per year, and leave at least 1 day per week without classes (and 2 days for the last 2 years). There is nothing better for learning than experience. The first 2 years I did unpaid internships, by my third year I knew enough to get paid 20$ / hour working part time. By my last year of school I was making 35$ / hour 2 days per week without even having a degree, that's over 2400$ while I was still studying 3 days a week. And not only money, I got a lot of hands-on experience.

by todd8 8y ago

0xffff2 8y ago

>This was a long time ago so it’s probably very different now. As a recent CS undergrad and current software engineer in a research organization, I don't think it is. Most of the people I worked with on group assignments in my undergrad had, at best, a limited understanding of their prior coursework, much less any knowledge acquired on their own time. Furthermore, CS PhDs in my org don't know anything about software engineering and mostly don't care. They are really here to do math. They don't need to write good code because I can transform their mediocre (from an SE perspective) code that handles the base case of a complex algorithm into better code that is maintainable, handles error cases and integrates with the rest of our codebase.

Msurrow 8y ago

I don’t think its different for CS grads today, and I don’t it is supposed to be. CS at a university is not meant to educate software devs; software dev is just one tool of a CS researcher — and depending on research field software dev/languages can be the object og research. A CS grad at uni is meant to teach the student to do CS research, ie. stay in academia. But I think CS grads are very popular for software dev positions, because of their very heavy theoretical knowledge within the field, which provides the basis for becomming a very good software dev.

xtrimsky1234 8y ago

It's not different for CS grads today. Half of my class was playing Quake 3 during classes :/. But one thing my school did perfectly, is force 3 months of internships per year, and leave at least 1 day per week without classes (and 2 days for the last 2 years). There is nothing better for learning than experience. The first 2 years I did unpaid internships, by my third year I knew enough to get paid 20$ / hour working part time. By my last year of school I was making 35$ / hour 2 days per week without even having a degree, that's over 2400$ while I was still studying 3 days a week. And not only money, I got a lot of hands-on experience.