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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?"
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.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Over the last six years I've been increasingly worried by the falling level of ability in CS students.
I've encountered CS students recently who in their third year are unable to do such basic things as understand memory allocation. As for algorithm design? Well that's simply unknown by the majority. That scares the shit out of me.
The Mantra is 'don't re-invent the wheel'. This is used as an excuse for students taking off the shelf components for assignments (sorting classes for java being used for sorting assignments for example), or being given virtually complete assignments by lecturers and being walked slowly through the assignment to the point where little or no original thinking is required.
Now it is true that re-inventing the wheel is a bad move at times. However whilst studying for their qualification, they should learn how to build the wheel in the first place.
Back to the memory allocation point. I currently know of no final year students with a decent understanding of this topic, and yet it is the main cause of security problems in code. They should at least have a working knowledge.
The ephasis is more and more on using languages designed to try and remove the main problems in code, but who writes these languages? It sure isn't the people who are only taught to use them, not create them.
The normal course of action is to blame Java, since it has led to a simplistic approach to CS assignments. I'd love to blame it, I ferkin hate the language, but that isn't the root cause.
Computer science is a hard topic that they are trying to make simpler to encourage more students. This has the result that CS students are graduating with ever reducing levels of ability, so people no longer see it as a worthwhile topic. Nowadays a CS student who wants to do really well has to work on independent study entirely apart from the course they are attending, and has also to face the unpleasant reality that their education as provided by the university is so poor that they may face years of further study to gain a useful level of ability.
Post graduate study can reduce this problem, but there are fewer post grads too, and often it is funding, not interest in a topic, that guides the selection of a course.
From the article:Here at De Montfort I run an ICT degree, which does not assume that programming is an essential skill. The degree focuses on delivering IT services in organisations, on taking a holistic view of computing in organisations, and on holistic thinking.
ie. not Computer Science. For those not familiar with the UK education set up I should also explain that De Montfort University is the old Leicester Polytechnic. The Polys were set up to provide much more practical education than the theoretical stances of the Universities, and a damned good job many did of it too - I'm certainly not playing the one-upmanship card that some do about the old polys, Leicester Poly was a good place and its successor De Montford has reached even further.
But the point stands - this point of view is coming from an academic teaching at a more practically-oriented institution and already running a non-science based course. His viewpoint should be considered against that background.
Cheers,
Ian
For that matter so is education in general. I am not a computer scientist, my education is technical instead. (LTS/MTS/HTS for the dutch)
When I attended the LTS we had real shop class, learning how to work with wood, steel, electricty with real world equipment in an area that looked much like you would expect to find in industry.
I recently had the occasion to visit a modern school that supposedly teaches the same skills, yet what I found was an ordinary classroom with a very limited and lightweight set of equipment. The kind of stuff you would find at home, NOT at work.
Yet somehow todays kids are supposed to learn the same skills.
And as if that ain't enough the number of hours of shop class have been reduced while the number of theory hours has been increased. Worse, the amount of technical theory has decreased as well and instead the amount of soft theory like history and such has taken over.
This has TWO negative impacts. First young kids coming to work can't hold basic equipment and don't understand the theory behind it and even worse the kinds of kids (like me) that used to select a techincal education because they don't like theory have that choice removed. I myself was far too restless to do a theorectical class, 18 hours of shop class per week however made the remainign theory that much easier to handle and because theory and practice were linked it all made sense.
Even worse, the modern education is supposed to make kids fit better into society, so how come they are bigger misfits then any generation before them?
No this is not old people talk. Notice even here on slashdot how the art of discussion is dying out, say anything remotely controversial and be labelled a flamebaiter or a troll by some kid who can't handle the heat. I actually had a 20 year old burst in tears about two years ago because I chewed him out for drilling through the work bench. Modern education is so much about empowerment that kids who think they are the top of the top can't handle suddenly being the lowest of the low when they enter a working life. This is already a shock simply because you just went from being the youngest in school to the oldest in school and now suddenly you are the youngest again.
Simply put, I think education in general is less and less about turning out skilled proffesionals and more and more about just keeping kids of the job market. Comp Sci ain't the only victim. Just try to get a good welder nowadays. Hell I settle for anyone who can knows the difference between a steel drill bit and a stone one. (And no, that doesn't mean one is made out of stone, rather what it is for drilling into).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
Summation 2
One problem is that the computing disciplines have become intermingled and are often used interchangeably. Let me outline my definitions:
Computer Science: This is the theoretical, researchoriented discipline. It deals with developing new algorithms, optimization and that side of things.
Software Development: This is the application side of Computer Science. It takes the algorithms developed by CompSci and makes useful applications out of them.
Information Technology: This is the techie discipline. Building computers, setting up networks, administrating systems. I'm not sure why it got that name, but it seems to have.
The problem that this guy has is that he has conflated Computer Science and Software Development. And it used to be the case that they were pretty much mixed - if you wanted to program, you needed to understand all the theoretical stuff yourself. But in these days of large, freely-available libraries and modular software design, the two have become very distinct disciplines.
It's not that Computer Science is dying out; it's that it has subdivided into two separate disciplines, and of the two, there is a much greater demand for Software Developers than Computer Scientists.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face