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Wait, I'm confused. > "Over the last few years we have noticed worrisome trends in CS education. The following represents a summary of those trends:...the deve
by brianto2010 18y ago
Wait, I'm confused.
> "Over the last few years we have noticed worrisome trends in CS education. The following represents a summary of those trends:...the development of programming skills in several languages is giving way to cookbook approaches using large libraries and special-purpose packages."
I agree with the "several languages" part, but why is using a large library a worrisome trend? Is it really that bad?
Using a library doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. Programmers often advocate code reuse and using a library is an example of code reuse. If you need to sort data, use a provided sorting algorithm or one written by someone smarter rather than writing it yourself. If a problem is solved, don't solve it again, right?
Does it have to do with understanding the solution to the problem?
- josh_nyc 18y agoI think they are referring to the fact that students new to programming learn to "always" rely on stringing together pre-existing libraries (namely in Java) rather than gaining experience by creating some functionality, algorithms, etc. from scratch. FWIW, I took a class taught by Shonberg (about OOP) when I attended NYU. Ironically NYU CS majors are required to take several classes that use Java, so I guess he wasn't able to convince the administration of his views. However, I learned a tremendous amount from the algorithms and OS courses there, and there were some great classes still using C and C++.
- Dilpil 18y agoIf anything, I've seen the opposite problem. Programming is fun- reading manuals is boring. People tend to want to dive right into the programming, without first doing research that would greatly improve the speed and stability of the project.