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Kernighan Teaches... Liberal Arts?
Flamerule writes "The New York Times has an article (free registration required) examining a new course Brian Kernighan is teaching at Princeton, called "Computers in Our World", aimed at liberal arts students who won't be going into the tech field. The author describes it as "a kind of intellectual smorgasbord, combining public policy - like technology's impact on privacy, copyright and antitrust matters - with large helpings of practical knowledge of how things work, from operating systems to disk drives." The K&R text is mentioned, though not as reverently as some would demand."
The question: do we have privacy? That that right was taken away Microshaft and the government back in the late 1990's
This will be on the exam.
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I think this is exactly the types of classes needed out there.
For all the people who know nothing of issues like electronic voting, DMCA, Elrdrid v. Ashcroft, the hardest thing was to get the idea out to non-computer folk. Raising awareness of complex technical issues is usually next to impossible, and this is a great start.
Anyway, my point is that a lot of these Lberal Arts kids are going to be interested in knowledge about a wide area of subjets--that's the whole focus of a Liberal Arts education. Computers is another area (though, today it would be extra interesting since everyone uses them but so few know how the "magic" works) to learn about. Of course, there are always some who don't want to learn.
I was wondering about textbooks or notes and looked up the course info at Princeton's site. It's COS 109... unfortunately they don't have many details but searching for K himself led me to his notes and problem sets (link is HTML, but notes are pdf). He obviously used cal(1) for the schedule, too.
Enjoy!
These people get a government job, and start telling their contractors what to do and how to do it
This courses introduction should be "Here is what real software engineers do (insert comlex UML diagram here), and this course won't prepare you to even get there."
Nice troll.
To paraphrase, I believe it's Swift, "a little learnin' is a dangerous thing", true. However, there's "a little learnin'" and awareness raising. How many people here moan about users who can't diagnose the most basic of hardware/software related problems. It's not because they don't want to diagnose the issue it's because they've been told that their computer is a dreadully complicated beast that they can never hope to understand. So if the printer doesn't print, it must be a problem that can only be resolved by a call to tech support rather than a quick check to see if the power is on, if the cables are plugged in or if the OS is reporting an error.
This course goes further though. It doesn't teach "howtos" -- which I agree can lead to trouble, it teaches fundamentals. What is it that makes a computer tick? How does it work? How is that mouse gestures and keystrokes make things go that then appear on a monitor. This is grand stuff to know and to teach. This isn't taught on a systems-level, but on a conceptual level. Nobody is going to come out of this thinking they can become kernel hackers.
What are you anyway? A programmer? an engineer? Whatever it is that you do, do you really believe that you shouldn't know about things outside of your core competence? Aren't you ever intrigued by the workings of nature? physics? What if a physcist said to you, "hey now, don't go reading that quantum physics stuff, you're liable to think you know something about it and cause a disaster." Or if a chef freaked because they saw you fingering a cookbook?
That said, I had plenty of wonderful discussions about all sorts of things at Stanford. Just because someone hasn't had two years of math and science doesn't make them inferior.
Of course, MIT probably doesn't have that many fuzzies going there, does it? So your peer group at MIT has already self selected when they decided to apply.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Yes, this is exactly the xenophobia I'm talking about.
Of course you should *learn* about them. Learning about something doesn't mean you have to *agree* with it.
You prove my point -- exactly -- about critical thinking. (And the dangers, alas, when it's lacking.)