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I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value. In college, I didn't learn version control,

I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value. In college, I didn't learn version control, continuous integration (continuously submitting your work in small changelists or patches), unit testing, making sure you're building the right product before building it, delivering the simplest possible code and design that meets the requirements, code quality, working in teams, untangling dependencies and making as much progress as possible today without waiting for all your dependencies to be resolved, and so on. I expect that all these skills will be very much relevant 20 years from now. So, don't confuse long-term value with "grounded in CS fundamentals". Programming isn't a hard science like physics.

learc83 11y ago
>I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value. I didn't say that. I said most industry processes are fads. I also didn't say that nothing that isn't grounded in CS fundamentals has long term value. There are plenty of other skills that have long term value. Office politics, salary negotiation, self-promotion are much more valuable than knowing how to run a few git commands. But non of those things should be taught in a Computer Science program. They are fundamentally vocational skills. Just like version control, unit testing, and continuous integration are vocational skills. Sure they're useful but they should be taught in an internship/apprenticeship or on the job. >In college, I didn't learn version control... I learned to use subversion, and other than the fact that they are are both version control systems, what I learned didn't really carry over to distributed version control like Git. In a CS program you should be learning things like how to implement a version control system, not how to use Git. I would have been pissed paying thousands of dollars per semester for a professor to walk me through a Git tutorial. I don't have a problem if a professor wants you to use github to submit your assignments or something like that. And sure some of the vocational skills you listed are going to be useful for years to come. But these skills should be ancillary. They should be just a happy side effect--like learning teamwork during a group project.
- kartickvad 11y ago
  I'm a practician, not a theorist or an academic. I couldn't care less whether something is based in CS theory. I care whether something will be useful to me over the course of my career. If it is, I'd like my education to train me for that. In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.
  - learc83 11y ago
    That's perfectly fine. What you're looking for is vocational training, not a liberal college education. Non professional college programs are explicitly not vocational training. If they were, they wouldn't require spending nearly half your time on general education requirements (assuming we're talking about the US here). I doubt art history, physics, or psychology has proven much direct use to you in your career. >In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view. Finite state machines and pushdown automata are an incredibly common pattern, and I can't see how you can work as a professional software developer without running into that pattern time and again. Have you never used regular expressions? Automata (usually taught along with theory of computation) teaches you all kinds of useful real world knowledge, like why you can't parse HTML with regular expressions, and why you can't write a program to tell if another program will eventually halt.
    - kartickvad 11y ago
      My idea of education is one that teaches you skills that are broadly used throughout your career. I don't a priori reject things that meet this criteria just because it's not based in theory (because theory is not an end to itself), or by applying arbitrary labels like "vocational" (whatever that means), "liberal" or "professional". As for art history and psychology, that's a different debate to be had about education — whether these should be part of education and how much time they should take. As for your question, I've used regexes, but you don't need to understand the details of the regex engine in order to use them. Neither do I, in my day-to-day work, write programs that try to tell if other programs halt.
Retra 11y ago
I did learn a lot of those things in college...

learc83 11y ago

>I think it's a fallacy to assume that anything not based in CS fundamentals is a fad or has only short-term value. I didn't say that. I said most industry processes are fads. I also didn't say that nothing that isn't grounded in CS fundamentals has long term value. There are plenty of other skills that have long term value. Office politics, salary negotiation, self-promotion are much more valuable than knowing how to run a few git commands. But non of those things should be taught in a Computer Science program. They are fundamentally vocational skills. Just like version control, unit testing, and continuous integration are vocational skills. Sure they're useful but they should be taught in an internship/apprenticeship or on the job. >In college, I didn't learn version control... I learned to use subversion, and other than the fact that they are are both version control systems, what I learned didn't really carry over to distributed version control like Git. In a CS program you should be learning things like how to implement a version control system, not how to use Git. I would have been pissed paying thousands of dollars per semester for a professor to walk me through a Git tutorial. I don't have a problem if a professor wants you to use github to submit your assignments or something like that. And sure some of the vocational skills you listed are going to be useful for years to come. But these skills should be ancillary. They should be just a happy side effect--like learning teamwork during a group project.

kartickvad 11y ago
I'm a practician, not a theorist or an academic. I couldn't care less whether something is based in CS theory. I care whether something will be useful to me over the course of my career. If it is, I'd like my education to train me for that. In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.
- learc83 11y ago
  That's perfectly fine. What you're looking for is vocational training, not a liberal college education. Non professional college programs are explicitly not vocational training. If they were, they wouldn't require spending nearly half your time on general education requirements (assuming we're talking about the US here). I doubt art history, physics, or psychology has proven much direct use to you in your career. >In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view. Finite state machines and pushdown automata are an incredibly common pattern, and I can't see how you can work as a professional software developer without running into that pattern time and again. Have you never used regular expressions? Automata (usually taught along with theory of computation) teaches you all kinds of useful real world knowledge, like why you can't parse HTML with regular expressions, and why you can't write a program to tell if another program will eventually halt.
  - kartickvad 11y ago
    My idea of education is one that teaches you skills that are broadly used throughout your career. I don't a priori reject things that meet this criteria just because it's not based in theory (because theory is not an end to itself), or by applying arbitrary labels like "vocational" (whatever that means), "liberal" or "professional". As for art history and psychology, that's a different debate to be had about education — whether these should be part of education and how much time they should take. As for your question, I've used regexes, but you don't need to understand the details of the regex engine in order to use them. Neither do I, in my day-to-day work, write programs that try to tell if other programs halt.

Retra 11y ago

I did learn a lot of those things in college...