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Computing's Lost Allure
khendron writes "An article in the New York Times, describes how the number of students majoring in computer science in university has dropped off with the rest of the hi-tech economy. The bright side: the students who are enrolling are doing so because they love computers. Not like a few years ago when students were enrolling because they wanted to make a quick buck. I'll take quality over quantity."
Because I am not really a much at calculus, which is necessary if you want to be really good at Computer Science.
Woah, there! I'm not sure what computer science you're talking about here. Calculus? Try logic, algebra, discrete mathematics, and number theory. Trust me, you don't need to know a lick of calc to excel in CS.
Someone earlier stated this fact that many CS programs do not actually teach you to program beyond a first year course on programming. I was taught I in my first year, but in order to finish my degree I had to learn LISP, Prolog, Smalltalk, C++, Perl, Awk, shell scripting, assembler and a host of other languages I can't even remember now. None of these were taught, they were all assumed. When you solved the problem and got something wrong or didn't do it as well as possible, the marker gave you pointers on how to use the language more appropriately.
What my degree did teach me was how to analyse a problem and not always go with the obvious solution. I have never met a self-taught person who has done an order analysis of an algorithm or searched for an optimal mechanism to implement beyond the obvious.
I am not saying that a self-taught person cannot be as capable or moreso that a university experienced person. What I am saying is that on balance, the number of very poor self-taught people far outweighs the number of very good self-taught people.
Interesting post. I'm sure that it depends on the school sometimes, though. I have spoken with some from other colleges who tell me that they could turn in programming assignments that did not compile. That would never fly at my school. And while I sure did question some of the theory classes that I had to take, later on I realized their importance.
A couple of weeks ago a fellow graduate friend of mine told me of someone with whom he works (who's graduate from another college, not our program) had him look at some code he had written. One of the things he found was a for-loop in which the author had on a certain condition break out of. My friend responded to this, stating how this was not a very elegant way of writing code and was not true to the form of the fuction of a for-loop, since the idea is that before the iterations begin you state exactly how many times you will iterate. The guy's response was "Well, it still works."
-- (Score:i, Imaginary)
My experience has been different, or perhaps my perspective differs from yours. I have found self-taught programmers to be very practical when it comes to solving a problem. I don't mean to disparage your degree but in a crunch, I prefer a programmer that can address the issue at hand over one that requires time to perform "an order analysis of an algorithm". When it comes to long-term-analysis or development, I'll give more weight to a CS degree. But when I need a fix _right now_, give me a hacker that knows the system and damn the torpedoes...full speed ahead!
I can understand and agree with you on that point. But I happen to work with a very intelligent person with a CS degree that could not install a network printer in Windows 2000, so I think the opposite might also be true.
I am self-taught and I tried college. I gave it up because I got tired of teaching the computer classes and I couldn't afford to quit my job to pursue my dream of studying at MIT.
I don't base the worth or ability of anyone upon a degree because I have learned that it's the person that matters more than their credentials.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
If there is one thing we should always remember, computer science != programming.
I think anyone stuyding CS will agree with this statement.