4 ms·

I'm tired of reading about how one person's favorite position on the abstraction continuum is the most important. Or at least I'm tired of reading that argument

by sofal 18y ago

I'm tired of reading about how one person's favorite position on the abstraction continuum is the most important. Or at least I'm tired of reading that argument with nothing to back it up. Sure, CS departments may benefit from changes, but I'd like Dr. Dewar to tell us why safety-critical systems programming, compiler debugging, and hardware spec testing are what university CS departments should focus on.

thomasmallen 18y ago
Agreed. A focus on application development to solve _real_ business problems as opposed to _fabricated_ hardware problems is key.
davidw 18y ago
To be fair, there was a brief bit along the lines of "because the easy, low-hanging fruit, web apps in Java jobs are the first ones to get outsourced". Whether that's really true or not is another matter.
- sofal 18y ago
  I'm all for shifting CS education away from easily outsourced commodity skills, but Dr. Dewar goes beyond that and argues that safety-critical embedded systems is where a CS education should be focusing. I'm sure if you asked a CEO of another tech company with a different technology focus you'd get a completely different take on what a CS department should be instilling into its students. Dewar is just another special interest lobbying for changes that will benefit his own industry.
YuriNiyazov 18y ago
The reason why compilers are quite possibly _the most_ important subject of CS, and should be a mandatory course in every department was well outlined in Steve Yegge's "Rich Programmer Food" blog post. The quick-and-dirty summary: anyone who can do compilers has the tools to manage codebases that are a magnitude larger than someone who doesn't. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...

4 ms·

I'm tired of reading about how one person's favorite position on the abstraction continuum is the most important. Or at least I'm tired of reading that argument

by sofal 18y ago

thomasmallen 18y ago
Agreed. A focus on application development to solve _real_ business problems as opposed to _fabricated_ hardware problems is key.
davidw 18y ago
To be fair, there was a brief bit along the lines of "because the easy, low-hanging fruit, web apps in Java jobs are the first ones to get outsourced". Whether that's really true or not is another matter.
- sofal 18y ago
  I'm all for shifting CS education away from easily outsourced commodity skills, but Dr. Dewar goes beyond that and argues that safety-critical embedded systems is where a CS education should be focusing. I'm sure if you asked a CEO of another tech company with a different technology focus you'd get a completely different take on what a CS department should be instilling into its students. Dewar is just another special interest lobbying for changes that will benefit his own industry.
YuriNiyazov 18y ago
The reason why compilers are quite possibly _the most_ important subject of CS, and should be a mandatory course in every department was well outlined in Steve Yegge's "Rich Programmer Food" blog post. The quick-and-dirty summary: anyone who can do compilers has the tools to manage codebases that are a magnitude larger than someone who doesn't. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...