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In a way MIT is right, computer had their days, now things are back to the real world. MIT handled this very poorly; it's always been very conservative about b
by hga 11y ago
In a way MIT is right, computer had their days, now things are back to the real world.
MIT handled this very poorly; it's always been very conservative about bulking up departments because things can radically change. Aero/Astro was red hot from, oh, post-WWI to the early 1970s, when it catastrophically crashed without to this date a recovery.
For decades EECS struggled with 40% of the undergraduates and ~1/6th of the institute's resources, in fact when they adopted the old core of 6.001-4 in the early '80s they dropped the "service" course that taught introductory programming for lack of human resources. I don't know how much the faculty was bulked up, the ultimate metric, but before the dot.com crash they committed a quarter billion dollars to a new CS research building that was ugly, very dysfunctional, and expensive to operate (so insecure it requires a full time police officer).
Anyway, I judge that "had their days" differently, at least in the longer term. Most specifically, one of these days a programming error will kill thousands or tens of thousands of people, and at least part of the field will radically change as people get more serious about "quality" software.
(Scare quotes because e.g. Facebook and Boeing have very different, and correct for both of them, definitions of software quality.)
- agumonkey 11y agoBy computers I meant desktops and their software or web apps. I was shallow anyhow, and you're right it will end up as reorganization in the field.