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is there some real "bottom up" curriculum? in retrospect I feel lucky to have grown with the tech: * TI58C programmable calculator, a handfull of registers, l

by froh 6y ago

is there some real "bottom up" curriculum? in retrospect I feel lucky to have grown with the tech: * TI58C programmable calculator, a handfull of registers, load store, conditional jump, that's it, essentially a very simple assembly-like language. * then CBM basic, two letter variable names, only globals, line numbers and goto/gosub * then (turbo) pascal with scopes, still single process unicore everything * then a little 6502 assembly (not my cup of tea) * then OS/2 and unix, and Linux when it started, multiprocessing (and multi user) on unicore * ...and proper computer science (as in von Neuman, Turing, Chomski hierarchy, compilers, sorting searching and complexity, graphs, etc) * then chroot * then virtualization (on the mainframe lol, but with Linux) * then containers and in parallel to the virtualization axis threads and green threads I'm grateful this allowed me to grow into the concepts step by step and grow an intuition for what's happening. and I wonder if there is some kind of "bottom up" curriculum somewhere that follows such a path?

randcraw 6y ago
Computer Engineering departments and degrees emphasize the stuff you mention more than CS does. CE largely extends its focus on software up to networking and O/Ses and down to compilers and instruction sets. And on the hardware side, from motherboards, interconnects, and peripherals down to CPUs, with side trips into non-PC architectures like SoCs (e.g. Raspberry Pi) and GPUs. The CE emphasis seems to be on the engineering tradeoffs of computer hardware design and implementation (at the symbolic level) and how it interacts with software. However, CE doesn't seem to take the next step down into VLSI or power or heat management or chip failure or transistor microelectronics, largely which remain the purview of EEs. Not all CE programs are strict about these emphases, however. Some adopt the name CE without moving appreciably away from mainstream CS. I suspect the name 'CE' better serves some professors' priorities and helps them sell their work as being rooted in engineering rather than in the abstractions and symbols rooted in math, from whence CS came.

by froh 6y ago

randcraw 6y ago

Computer Engineering departments and degrees emphasize the stuff you mention more than CS does. CE largely extends its focus on software up to networking and O/Ses and down to compilers and instruction sets. And on the hardware side, from motherboards, interconnects, and peripherals down to CPUs, with side trips into non-PC architectures like SoCs (e.g. Raspberry Pi) and GPUs. The CE emphasis seems to be on the engineering tradeoffs of computer hardware design and implementation (at the symbolic level) and how it interacts with software. However, CE doesn't seem to take the next step down into VLSI or power or heat management or chip failure or transistor microelectronics, largely which remain the purview of EEs. Not all CE programs are strict about these emphases, however. Some adopt the name CE without moving appreciably away from mainstream CS. I suspect the name 'CE' better serves some professors' priorities and helps them sell their work as being rooted in engineering rather than in the abstractions and symbols rooted in math, from whence CS came.