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Johnny Can So Program
theodp writes "In Johnny Can So Program, CS Prof Norm Matloff calls BS on CNET stories like Can Johnny Still Program? and Can the U.S. Still Compete?, saying it's a shame that CNET fails to cover the real threat to American technological competitiveness, the hidden agendas of Chicken Littles like Jim Foley of the Computing Research Association, David Patterson of the ACM and former Intel CEO Craig Barrett, all of whose organizations have a vested interest in playing the education card."
Will slashdot help to identify responsible, long-term thinking candidates/policies, or does the second word of this sentence inform its answer?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I have been in the U.S for the last six years. Right from the beginning I was surprised to find the constant barrage of sports over everything else (only outdone by Terrorism and Elections) in this country. Here parents pray their kids end up on the school/college football teams for both bragging rights as well as the potential for a lot of moolah in the future (mostly I think its bragging rights). Jocks get limelighted every step, every game, gets the hotter looking babe and scrapes through academics yet has no trouble getting in to college due to his sports background. The science nerds barely gets any mention in school over their accomplishment and rarely gets highlighted among their community or in the media. Almost never. Yet they positively contribute to the country and get sucked in to the same cycle, hoping their kids turn in to football players and get the girls they could only dream of.
Where I am from: Literacy is 100%. Sports hour or P.T is a one hour drill where the students are herded for rigorous exercises, which happens thankfully only once a week. At the school level, there is hardly any sports events, mostly it is to do with academics, science shows, arts and cultural events, literature events. Sports is mainly soccer or cricket and is indulged in during the lunch hour or afterschool. No sponsors, no parents wishing their kid would become the next star. Infact, if some kid grabs his gear and heads off to the local soccer ground during study hour, he is likely to play alone.
Academics comes first and foremost. Infact, I used to wish it were different, but not anymore. And on the state and regional level, those who pass the Secondary School exam (10th grade) with rank (ranks 1 - 15 on state level) are rewarded by the State Govt. Same goes for National Level.
I see none of that in the U.S. I see undue importance being given to Sports, and little given to academics. I see MVP's regarded as Gods while the ones who transparently contributed +vely to the society languish in anonymity.
Rapid Nirvana
Amazingly - the more complex the computer system the larger is effort-to-wow-factor ratio it seems. What had you try to teach those kids? Do you think that doing some low-level stuff for simpler systems may spark their interest easier?( hmm, handheld game consoles?, smartphones?, or maybe non-WinCE-PDAs?) Also, it will undoubtably give them more insight into CS than any of .NET/VBA, BTW.
(and isn't Davis all aggies anyway?)
From the article:
"News.com didn't tell you that the number of teams competing has grown nearly sevenfold from 1994 through 2005. In other words, for a team to finish at, say, third place, in 1994 would be equivalent to finishing 21st this year. So a hypothetical team that News.com would have lauded in 1994 would now be dismissed as having badly "slipped" in 2005, even though it would be of the same quality."
From this I guess the author means that it's OK to be at the same level they were eight years ago. It doesn't matter that the American teams didn't improve at the same rate at the rest of the world. And in his statistical argument he ignores that although team numbers might have increased so did the number of American teams.
Next comes my absolute favorite argument:
"Long before Olympic athletes from all countries became quasiprofessionals, the Eastern European countries were seeing to it that training for the Games was their athletes' full-time job, giving them a major advantage over other nations' athletes."
OMG, it's not fair, they trained harder! Well hello! Is it cheating to produce programmers who can actually solve problems and write code? What exactly is coursework for if it isn't preparation for the kinds of problems you solve in programming contests? I've done a couple - it's the same thing, you just have to be faster and more accurate, compared to a programming assignment.
"the hidden agenda behind the shrill shortage claims was to push Congress to increase the yearly cap on the H-1B work visa program, which enabled industry to import cut-rate engineers from abroad."
I was a H1-B worker - I made great rates (thanks very much) and so did all the other H1-B's I know. It's convenient for Norm's flawed argument to repeat this myth, propagated by programmers who think they should have had my job because it was their birthright, not because they could have done it better.
"How can American engineers compete with cheap, imported labor?"
Too much time in academia Norm. If you can't do the job right it really doesn't matter how cheap you come. The way to compete is to be the best, there is no other way. Shopping for programmers is not like shopping for socks. Remember, computer-related thingys are digital. At the end of the day it is usually pretty obvious whether they work or do not work. "Almost works" is not good enough for anyone, except perhaps a professor who grades CS101 papers.
When Chinese (or Indian, or anyone else) programmers turn out to cost less AND be better programmers we'll be able to thank guys like Norm, who wanted to deny there was ever a problem.
What's Norm's issue with devoting more to education - is it just that he wants to be able to say "It wasn't MY fault?"
From this I guess the author means that it's OK to be at the same level they were eight years ago. It doesn't matter that the American teams didn't improve at the same rate at the rest of the world. And in his statistical argument he ignores that although team numbers might have increased so did the number of American teams.
... At the end of the day it is usually pretty obvious whether they work or do not work. "Almost works" is not good enough for anyone
While your statistical point is valid, your improvement one is not. He's saying that there's a large number of new entries, not that existing entries got better.
OMG, it's not fair, they trained harder! Well hello! Is it cheating to produce programmers who can actually solve problems and write code? What exactly is coursework for if it isn't preparation for the kinds of problems you solve in programming contests? I've done a couple - it's the same thing, you just have to be faster and more accurate, compared to a programming assignment.
If you've not participated in these types of challenges in specific, then it's hard to explain. These types of contests are based on the field in general, not on specific coursework that is commonplace. Doing coursework does help, but a more focused study on the contest and the types of problems in the contest does yield better results... in the contest itself. But it's just a contest, it bears very little relation to anything outside of itself. I've done several, and the contests should *not* be like your normal programming assignments. Different goals, different problems.
I was a H1-B worker - I made great rates (thanks very much) and so did all the other H1-B's I know. It's convenient for Norm's flawed argument to repeat this myth, propagated by programmers who think they should have had my job because it was their birthright, not because they could have done it better.
He has a point though, while H1-B workers do get paid well (it's a technical field, everybody gets paid well), on average they don't make as much as a non-H1-B worker. Simple statistical truth, that is.
The way to compete is to be the best, there is no other way.
You're right, and that's why "be the best" isn't a long term good strategy. While I agree that a good programmer can always get a job, I disagree that you need to be the best to do it. The best person doesn't always get the job. The guy who is good enough to "make it work" will get the job, and that guy is not necessarily the best at it.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Open source libs such as CDX and SDL take ALL of the pain out of Direct X. With these tools you can get a game framework up and running on Windows with just a few lines of code.
For example, Download and install Dev-Cpp, run the built in web update to download and install SDL, and BAM you have an open source game-building IDE and libs with example code.
15-20 years ago you had to purchase a C++ compiler, purchase hardware books so that you could fiddle around with secret hardware settings to get to Mode X, monkey with sound card settings that could hang your box if set incorrectly, etc.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
I went to UCDavis, and all the students I knew loved Norm Matloff. He speaks Chinese, he was one of the first to do heavy research on supporting Chinese characters in software, and if I recall correctly, his wife is Chinese (I couldn't find it anywhere on his webpage to back that part up).
Here's his Chinese software page:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/chinese.html
I hate to use the classic "but I have lots of black friends!" anti-racist argument here, but I think he has earned it. I think the reason your friends don't want him as their advisor is because he is one of the toughest Prof's at Davis, and he isn't going to give out a free ride through grad school.
Of course, you have been modded up, and no one is going to read my reply, so the false prejudiced accusation is what people will see. But again, this IS slashdot. The first to respond is always right!
As an aside, he was also a big reason that Intel Corp. in Sacramento changed their stance on G.P.A. being the major deciding factor in hiring a student. They used to throw out all resumes that were under a 4.0 G.P.A. (they had THAT many applying). Dr. Matloff basically showed them that the students that could REALLY program weren't the ones getting A's. He has a paper somewhere on his site, but again, no one is going to read this reply anyway!
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
Any comment on PyGame? Seems just about perfect to me. Cross-platform with SDL, interpretive so you don't get bogged down in code-compile-link, yet uses enough native libraries that you can go further than a completely interpreted system would.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Buisiness people and managers are playing the power game. They don't want craftsman, they want interchangeable parts. With that midset comes necessarily the belief that what you do is factory work. To master any craft means that the novice must dedicate years and years into learning the skill. MS certificated "programmer" is not real programmer. He/She is code slave. Behold! New class of people working nonphyscical equivalent of cotton picking is born.
If you have any true programming skills nowdays, you are promoted. End are the days of programming. You are now supposed to herd group of caffeine-addicted-monkeys or write nice pictures (UML) to them so they can write it painfully down.
Quoting one of the true masters:
Dyslexics have more fnu.
I guess I should have RTFA better the first time. Support for the "his wife is Chinese" is here:
"as someone who married into a Shanghai family, I congratulate the bright, dedicated members of the winning Jiaoda team, which also took first place in 2002"
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
We can't blame outsourcing on Indian or Chinese programmers. They're doing what's good for themselves and their families. We could blame corporations, but corporations never listen to criticism, even from shareholders, and certainly not from Slashdot comments.
What would work would be corporate tax breaks for creating American jobs. Bigger would be better, but they don't have to be huge. There may be many thousands of jobs where the difference in utility between hiring an American and outsourcing just isn't that large, and a small incentive would push it back to the American worker.
Another thing that might help would be a system of labelling that tells how many American jobs were involved in the manufacture of a product. How you guarantee the accuracy of such labels is a question; corporations will face incentives to lie about the numbers.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
So my question to Norm Matloff is. . .
"Is your own house in order?"
Are you, a CS professor, teaching real computer science, or are you teaching programming and calling it computer science at the behest of Intel?
This question is downright ridiculous. He is without a doubt the best professor I've known. He is notorious (feared?) in his department for teaching real Computer Science. Prof. Matloff's students rip out their hair solving his problems, but nearly every student of his will give a glowing review of his courses.
There are some instructors who are easy, there are some instructors who are difficult for the sake of being difficult, and then there are those who enrich. Prof. Matloff certainly enriches his students.
-Former Student of Prof. Matloff
However, when it came down to actually doing it, and learning to code, they all, except for one, said "We're just more interested in playing games."
Hrm, sorta like those goof-offs at MIT who developed Space War, huh?
Of course, we all know that nothing good ever resulted from that effort...RIGHT?
When I arrived to the United States in mid 90s, my view was exactly the same: American's could not do anything and no American was smart enough to do advanced stuff. Dear Americans, please accept my apologies. I was wrong and pumped by skewed views.
In high school, it seemed that a great fraction of kids were being dragged along in order to meet some sort of a requirement. I was puzzled becuase I went to one of the best schools in the U.S. at that time. What I did not know, was the fact that the school was required to try its best in order to educate the students. In my former country, Belarus, a great majority of those slackers would never see the 10th grade.
I remember how everybody told me that the U.S. had no science and no math. Unfortunately, this is partly true becuase there are no hard requirements: a student can get by several years of simple math and science without even getting into advanced stuff. It turned out that if you wanted to succeed, all you had to do is work harder and take the advanced courses yourself! Yes, that is right. Most of the kids in my AP classes were just as smart as my former peers. They wanted to study advanced stuff and they got it. If one covered all the courses offered by my high school, that person could go on and take courses at a local university. That totally busted my old opinions about this country. Granted, not every teenager is dreaming about yet another calc test. So what? As long as we have people who are willing to take on and progress, we'll be fine. In fact, I enjoyed that advanced clases were small because you had to qualify in order to get there!
The same thing applies to college. You can take easy courses and slack or you can take advanced courses and try to do your best. I opted for the latter. I worked really hard to get an A in a computer graphics class while my buddies were driking beers while creating a database driven website project for a lower level course. We ended up with the same grades, but I had to work my ass off. You get the point. In the end, everything is up to you. In many countries of the world students are simply required to study more whether they want it or not. This is subjective as well. Do students appreciate the material that their teachers force upon them? Does it make any sense to have the same math program for every student? Does it make sense to benchmark students at all?
I guess Johnny can program. The real issue is that Johnny wants to earn some money doing it. Competing with people who come from India or China is hopeless when you have a mortgage, kids, and educational loans. Had it not been for my monetary baggage in terms of ed loans and high rent payments, I'd work for ten dollars per hour. The question about visa workers and offshoring should not be discussed via one's skill level. It is the salary that counts. I know of several companies that had to bring their development and support back because the price of their offshored contractors went up.
FYI, I have seen some posts about bright foreign exchange students. That is all nice and cute. However, you have to remember that students who come here on visas are not your average kids! After my family moved here, a couple of my former classmates were chosen to represent my former country in a foreign student exchange program. These were the cream of the crop kids. Straight As, good behavior, good discipline. In order to qualify for the program, you had to jump through many hoops and truly show that you're the best from the best in terms of your brain power and language skills. These guys were pretty smart by default and they truly stood out regardless of the student body. Being a smart person and an immigrant makes you stand out. There you have it.
Robocode is designed to use a game-development environment to teach programming. Check it out.
Thank you for a revealing post, though.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear