Is Computer Science Dead?

warm sushi writes "An academic at the British Computing Society asks, Is computer science dead? Citing falling student enrollments and improved technology, British academic Neil McBride claims that off-the-shelf solutions are removing much of the demand for high-level development skills: 'As commercial software products have matured, it no longer makes sense for organizations to develop software from scratch. Accounting packages, enterprise resource packages, customer relationship management systems are the order of the day: stable, well-proven and easily available.' Is that quote laughable? Or has the software development industry stabilized to an off-the-self commodity?"

Comments

Wow!

[OverlordQ]

Accounting packages, enterprise resource packages, customer relationship management systems are the order of the day: stable, well-proven and easily available.

And who made those packages?

Software don't write itself.

Computer Science "is too hard"

[Rik Sweeney]

That's why people don't do it. When I was at University in the UK (Portsmouth if anyone cares), I did Maths and Computing.

The first year consisted of learning how to format a floppy disk and write a Word document. Oh, and there was some Java thrown in there, but people found Java too hard and complained. Java then got removed from the curriculum and we did crap like theories in Artificial Intelligence instead.

We had the option of doing C++ in our final year but this largely consisted of printing out to the console and writing some text to a file. No fancy shit like Pointers or anything like that. Most people didn't elect to do this option as programming is hard work and they just stuck to Matlab instead.