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Bjarne Stroustrup On Educating Software Developers
jammag writes "Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++ and a professor at Texas A&M, weighs in on the problems in today's CS programs. In particular, Java (there's too much of it), the quality of graduates (companies aren't happy), and the need to balance the theoretical and the practical (long overdue). Not pulling punches, Stroustrup even talks about high schools — 'High schools could teach students to work hard at something (just about anything), to search out information as needed, and learn to express their ideas in writing and orally.' He finishes by giving advice to working developers: 'Serious programming is a team sport, brush up on your social skills. The sloppy fat geek computer genius semi-buried in a pile of pizza boxes and cola cans is a mythical creature, best buried deep, never to be seen again.'" Read on for more choice quotes from the quotable professor.
I have even had questions from strangers in airplanes: "You're a professor? In software? Have you got any students? Here's my card."
The US industry could absorb more good developers than there are currently students enrolled in IT-related programs — but not all of those programs and all of those students would qualify as "good" in this context.
The companies are complaining because they are hurting. They can't produce quality products as cheaply, as reliably, and as quickly as they would like. They correctly see a shortage of good developers as a part of the problem. What they generally don't see is that inserting a good developer into a culture designed to constrain semi-skilled programmers from doing harm is pointless because the rules/culture will constrain the new developer from doing anything significantly new and better.
The contemporary Math, Physics, and Biology books I have seen are far, far more conceptually challenging than what we present to CS and engineering students in the area of programming.
I think the ultimate aim is to make programming more of an engineering discipline, more mathematical or scientific; "craft" and "art" are both needed, but there ought to be a scientifically based core on which people can base their craft and art. Software design and implementation is more than a craft; there is more math, science, and engineering to know and apply than is customary for fields we call "crafts." Incidentally, I find it appalling that you can become a programmer with less training than it takes to become a plumber.
I have even had questions from strangers in airplanes: "You're a professor? In software? Have you got any students? Here's my card."
The US industry could absorb more good developers than there are currently students enrolled in IT-related programs — but not all of those programs and all of those students would qualify as "good" in this context.
The companies are complaining because they are hurting. They can't produce quality products as cheaply, as reliably, and as quickly as they would like. They correctly see a shortage of good developers as a part of the problem. What they generally don't see is that inserting a good developer into a culture designed to constrain semi-skilled programmers from doing harm is pointless because the rules/culture will constrain the new developer from doing anything significantly new and better.
The contemporary Math, Physics, and Biology books I have seen are far, far more conceptually challenging than what we present to CS and engineering students in the area of programming.
I think the ultimate aim is to make programming more of an engineering discipline, more mathematical or scientific; "craft" and "art" are both needed, but there ought to be a scientifically based core on which people can base their craft and art. Software design and implementation is more than a craft; there is more math, science, and engineering to know and apply than is customary for fields we call "crafts." Incidentally, I find it appalling that you can become a programmer with less training than it takes to become a plumber.
Unless you finish that sentence..
Companies are not happy with the fresh coders because the good ones wont accept the low salaries they offer.
Sorry but Programming is HARD. you gotta pay a lot for a good programmer. That will not change.
I am sick of corporations and companies making up this raging BS story about a lack of candidates. RAISE YOUR SALARIES AND THOSE CANDIDATES WILL APPEAR.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think he has a good point. One we already knew, but good none the less. I have just completed two years of a Software Engineering degree and it really was an easy two years with nothing all that challenging presented. I have friends getting good marks which really aren't that good (hope you guys aren't reading..) Software Engineering has apparently been said to be the hardest form of Engineering around because it's so hard to wright a program of significant size which is bug free. If structural engineers building bridges had as many bugs in their work as software engineers have in theirs, the world would be a very unsafe place.
Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++ [...] weighs in on [...] Java (there's too much of it)
Oh, gee, now THAT is a surprise!
Coding can be a hobby, in which case sure, you can do it alone (though for significant project, it gets rough, with all of the cross cutting concerns... someone who's extremely good at algorythms may totally suck at designing a public API... fairly common in CS-heavy companies that do a lot of backend stuff).
I'm guessing though, they were referring to coding in the real world (for a living), in which case, for anything significant (no, the ecommerce website someone makes as a freelance isn't significant), you'll need to be a good teamplayer. People who are good at making functional GUIs often suck at backend programming, and vice sera. People good in architectures often miss the details. Computer scientists often cannot understand project managers and architects. Thus, it becomes a team sport (like you'd have goalers, offense, defense, etc). Being able to work as part of that team is almost as possible (sometimes moreso) than just being good at your specialty.
They can't produce quality products as cheaply, as reliably, and as quickly as they would like...
I think the ultimate aim is to make programming more of an engineering discipline, more mathematical or scientific; "craft" and "art" are both needed, but there ought to be a scientifically based core on which people can base their craft and art.
We all know that we get to choose two of the three, problem is companies want all three without any consessions.
Also, imposing rigor on software design increases time and in certain situations cost, while increasing reliability. While we are definitely heading in the right direction as a field; there is a long way to go before we ever get to any kind of discipline that is both as rigorous as other science or engineering disciplines and usable on the scale that people currently expect software to be at. Real customers by and large can't (although some cases won't) pay for rigorous development. Hell, the mentality has been creeping into consumer electronics as long as I've been alive. The current market drives us towards fast and cheap and only towards reliable if the customer is pissed.
What they generally don't see is that inserting a good developer into a culture designed to constrain semi-skilled programmers from doing harm is pointless because the rules/culture will constrain the new developer from doing anything significantly new and better.
I almost stood up and cheered when I read this, until I realized that nobody who can change things is reading, and besides I would have disturbed the other cubicle rats.
Have you read my blog lately?
Yeah, but what Stroustrup is trying to say is that the formal process has to be taught, so that the latter process can work more efficiently. Now matter how much of a flash of insight I get, I'll never even code Hello World if I don't know how to program properly.
Most of these topics can easily be researched and learned without a university.
Yes, they can be researched - but, let's face it: most people either think it's beyond them, think they'll never need to know it, or are just too lazy. The ones who would research it themselves are likely to be the ones who are good anyway.
The problem is, you're lumping all development into some generic activity called "coding." That ignores the simple fact that being an expert in C++ does not make you expert at UI design. Being an expert at UI design doesn't make you a SQL whiz. Being a SQL whiz does not make you an expert at designing flexible & scalable application systems with many moving parts.
See the pattern? To make any practically-useful system today, you MUST work with other people who are expert in areas you're very likely not an expert in. You can create the best data model in existence for your company's payroll system, but if you don't have a clear understanding of the business rules, a good architecture, and a solid UI (and I've seen very few people in software engineering who are experts at all of the pieces that go into creating a good piece of software), the resulting product will be an unusable piece of crap that doesn't meet requirements.
Stroustrop's point of the single genius programmer is valid. The model you describe supposes that a single person can possibly learn and be expert in all of the disparate knowledge areas that are required to make a working piece of software, and in any group, the people who are capable of that level of insight & knowledge will *always* be the statistical outliers. Instead of punishing the majority of people for not being born with genius-level intellect, teach them how to be good at their chosen area of expertise, and how to relate to the people they have to work with to get things done. You don't have to engage in XP or some other "pair programming" methodology to realize value from being able to communicate clearly and work with your architect, QA / Reliability engineers, your customers, your project manager, and other developers who are working on separate subsystems.
This is all well and good, and there's no doubt that an engineering/logical approach is very important in engineering, but there is something of an art about engineering as well. I can slog all day designing/building/coding/prototyping away, working from diagrams, notes and even flowcharts (though not formalized ones, I'll admit, like days gone by), but sometimes my best and most productive work are those creative flashes I get, when any kind of formal process is tossed out the door. Sure, I have to go back later and document my work so that even I can understand it, but there will always be that creative aspect to engineering, and that ain't necessarily bad.
The companies that complain about the lack of "good" developers are the ones paying their developers crap and looking to offshore/cut costs. If you want good developers you're going to have to pay them.
I work at a company that pays at least 10% more than the going rate at other companies in the state and interviews 2-3 / week. It takes 3 weeks on average to find a developer they're willing to make an offer to. Two of the companies that are complaining are Google and Microsoft, both of whom give good salaries and great benefits when compared with the average job.
I've worked at several companies that paid decent amounts of money, and between 50% and 75% of the developers are crap. In my experience, good developers are hard to find at any price.
What is it exactly that you think an engineering approach actually is? Some sort of formulaic fill in the blank? Engineering is coming up with ways to apply tools (physics, chemistry, math) to solve problems. Engineering curriculums teach engineers to think in such a way that they can do so. Any good engineering is an art form.
Lack of funding? Young man, I learned Pascal on a TRS-80 Model II. The cellphone that is likely in your pocket is probably more powerful in just about every aspect. The book we learned from was probably close to a decade old at the time and was sad in the shadow of what you can get at Borders for 25 bucks. I learned programming just fine.
You don't need the latest and greatest to learn how to code. Infact, the more I see of computers and teenagers the more I think I had it better being limited to machines that didn't have a 1/10th of a meg of RAM and no Internet. Today there are just far too many distractions on a PC to get kids away from the task at hand. To be honest, if I were teaching coding I would go with the 2004 text about whatever language that normally can be found in the bargin bin for 5 bucks, a bunch of P-II 350s, a 10 dollar flash drive for each student and whatever freeware IDE I could find for the chosen language. No other software on the PC and no network connections either, thankyouverymuch.
This would keep the students mind on the task in front of him. When I first got my Vic 20 with no media storage and no game cartridges I had to sit down and learn how to make the machine do what I want it to. I found that it was a very gratifying thing to do. If I would have had MySpace and EverQuest I doubt I would have ever have gotten as far.
BTW: Get off my lawn!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
From an engineering standpoint: There is no reason for software to break, and yet it does, a lot of the time.
Nonsense. Software, like any other engineered system, will break when subjected to forces in excess of what it was designed to tolerate.
Would you argue that a building must NEVER fall down? I hope not.
I know about extreme programming, and I've really enjoyed some team programming sessions, but when it comes down to it, I think one reason some people hold a much deeper level of knowledge than their peers is that they spend extreme amounts of time alone.
...
People who are fascinated with math and coding tend to have fewer peers who can understand what they are doing. Is this a bad thing? ... I guess the challenge is to guide young people to seek out their peers (those who are fascinated with the same things), and to make friends without making everything into a competition. ... There is a place for ambition, but that instinct can be a hinderance.
I think you've misunderstood was Bjarne was talking about. Most software projects have a dozen or more developers requiring close collaboration and the ability to cope with egos and positive/negative emotions. Also, just the ability to communicate your information to someone who needs it. Damn straight modern programming is a team sport! Are you working on tiny apps in a small closet hidden somewhere inside a small company? 'Cause for the rest of us, our day is filled with interacting with people. I'm very introverted, but I do need social skills to deal with the people I work with every day -- which causes me extra stress, but I digress. Software development in big companies and FOSS projects is a team effort, and for successful projects, the humans working on those teams need to work together smoothly.
Eventually, you start talking about what Bjarne was talking about at AT&T: social skills doesn't mean your hosting dinner parties and chatting up girls. It means being able to share and communicate your idea to another very smart person, and then being able to listen and learn from that other very smart person. I think you shifted into that point at the end of your post: the idea that introverted smart people need to find other smart people they can talk with.
Social skills in this context doesn't mean being the life of the party or tossing a football with non-geeks. Social skills means being able to tell the prima donna that his code has a bug in it. It means being able to explain to others why a design or architecture is bad. It's coping with hurt feelings: yours and theirs. The basic social skills of working in a modern business environment.
Programming has evolved waaaay beyond the lone programmer in his little corner office working his own hours. A programmer is expected to talk to end users and tease out their real requirements; it requires them to be able to stand up and argue for something in a room full of managers; it requires having the ability to tell another programmer his coding style is awful, but you want to help him to get better.
That's what Bjarne meant by social skills and team programming.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I know it can still be used that way, but it seems to be more and more difficult to only code that way using C++, because you're going to have to use libraries at some point or another.
Yeah, those damned templated libraries with their: performance, type safety, design patterns, generic programming principles. I can't imagine why Java wasn't happy with containers of Objects and added Generics. C# definitely shouldn't have followed suit. All you need is void*, size_t, and int (*)(void *, void *), right?
It's amusing seeing Strostrup whining that schools are teaching Java instead of his C++. The problem with C++ is Strostrup. He's in denial about many of the fundamental problems of C++. He's publicly stated that there's nothing major wrong with C++. If that was the case, we wouldn't need Java and C#, which are, after all, attempts to improve on C++.
Down at the bottom, the fundamental problem with C and C++ is the "pointer=array" concept. That was OK for 1978, but it didn't scale well. It's the cause of most of the buffer overflows in the world. C and C++ don't even have syntax for properly talking about the size of an array parameter. That's just broken. C and C++ need something like conformant array syntax for parameters and in other contexts where one needs to talk about the size of an array.
The second fundamental problem with C and C++ is that the programmer must obsess on "who owns what", and the language not only doesn't provide help with this, it doesn't even have syntax for talking about it. There's no distinction between a pointer that "owns" an object and one that just "uses" it. Yet if the programmer doesn't carefully make that distinction, the program will have either memory leaks or dangling pointers.
The trend in C++, since templates went in, is to try to wallpaper over the problems with the underlying model. It never quite works; the mold always seeps through the wallpaper. Container classes almost, but not quite, succeed at encapsulation. There's almost always some place where a raw pointer has to be allowed to leak out. The standards committee has gone off on a "generic programming" tangent, with emphasis on weird template features used by few and used correctly by fewer. Just because you can abuse the C++ template system as a term-rewriting engine doesn't mean you should do that in production code. This results in a whole new class of incredibly obscure compile-time bugs. The standards committee has been thrashing for over a decade in this area; in the 1990s, the new version was to be "C++9x"; now it's "C++0x", and since we're close to 2009 already, "C++1x" looks like the reality.
C++ is the only major language to have hiding ("abstraction") without memory safety. No previous language had it, and no later language repeats that mistake.
Back around 2001, I made an effort to do something about it, but the political hassle was more than I had time for.
Never a good fit for the real world? What about all those games written in C++? Do you really think Valve's Source engine would be as good if it were written in Java?
On the other hand, I agree with you that average to less-than-average programmers will never grasp the more advanced pieces of C++. I think the solution is to teach them better, the solution is not to dump C++ in favor of $other_language. (C++ isn't right for all situations, but I think all CS programs should at least teach it.)
That the companies that are complaining about the poor training that new students are getting are not willing to hire older programmers who got exactly the kind training Bjarne is pushing for. Yeah, got exactly what he wants to put back into schools today, then we have tested it and developed it over decades of developing and shipping products. And there are hundreds of thousands of us out of work in the US.
I've taught programming classes and have had the experience of having companies call asking for the names of students who did well in my classes. I have also had the experience of trying to apply for those jobs. I have told the companies that I will work for an entry level salary and since they trust me to do the training and evaluation of the students you would think was qualified...
The best response was to be ignored, the worst was being laughed at.
Fuck 'em all,
Stonewolf
University isn't vocational training, and it certainly isn't vocational training for the specific tool set that you happen to use. If you mean that it would be reasonable to offer a Windows programming elective, great. But mandating a class in operating Visual Studio makes about as much sense as mandating a course in Ruby on Rails or the iPhone SDK.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I have to say after reading this article -- Stroustrup is a tool. It is just that simple. Nothing more than a pundit at this point. He had a stroke of genius in programming and now is an expert in everything related to programming.
He thinks companies aren't happy with their graduates? Well, I say companies have terrible hiring practices, terrible mentorship programs, and ridiculous expectations.
Balance the theoretical and the practical? Wow. Brilliant observation. Great, Bjarne. Please give us more sweeping Karate-Kid style one-liners.
High schools should teach students to work hard? Great, Bjarne. Thanks again for that. Search out information as needed? Another stroke of brilliance. Express ideas in writing and verbally? WOW. PINCH ME. Such genius can only be dreamed of.
Then, the article closes with him trying to be edgy and go out "with a bang". Sloppy, fat geeks. Nice. This guy is a douchebag. Pure and simple.
Here is my own contribution to douchbaggery... I think we should take aging, isolated, self-important pundits out into a remote area and bury them neck deep in the dirt.
There is a reason the programmer stereotype is the geek with poor social skills, because most bright people with strong social skills are going to quickly jump to the business side of the company where they can make more money and climb faster. Its a form of natural selection.
Developing software is really not that great a career, when compared to the other modern careers in business(though its obviously better than factory worker and ditch digger). It does draw some good people who enjoy developing software or maybe don't have the temperament for other professions(translation: geeks who would suck at business, marketing, law and medicine). There are some geeks that score big in software which are the exception to the rule but that happens at about the same frequency as people scoring big in professional sports or acting at least since the dot com bubble burst.
Problem #1, software development isn't a career path that will last you until retirement or if it does the entire second half of your career will suck. In most companies programming is a career for 20 somethings, maybe 30 somethings, 40 somethings if you stretch it. You better hope you land hit on a lucrative startup in your prime so you can get your FU money and retire young. Once you hit your 40's and 50's you are either going to be forced to switch to self employment or to management otherwise your career advancement is going level off and you hope it doesn't start going down. Fifty and sixty year old programmers are something of an oddity and usually discriminated against because the stereotype is you need to be young to be a programmer. The exception is maybe if you have a PhD and can jump to research. Jumping to management or self employment mid career is fine for some people but it requires a radically different skill set and temperament to manage people, business, customers, budgets and schedules and not code. A lot of coders wont succeed in the transition.
Problem #2, most programming jobs don't really pay that well though again its better than factory work :) You will need to be a superstar and create products that you own and control or you aren't going to make big money. If you are a programmer stuck in a large organization the executives, marketing people and salesmen are going to be the ones getting rich and climbing fast. There is a reason so many climbers seek MBA's, even if its dubious MBA's have real value in the world (especially after witnessing the recent meltdown induced largely by MBA's, George W. Bush included in that number).
As a programmer will probably do OK money wise, but you will probable have an opportunity to work long hours on tough projects, and do some painful death marches to get products out the door. If the product fails then you hope you survive the layoffs that ensue. If it succeeds you discover the people above you in the food chain have taken most of the profits, and throw crumbs to the programmers unless they are superstars. If you are lucky you get a small raise or a few options(since options are accounted now they aren't as widely available as they used to be especially on the lower rungs of the food chain). You then just get to start over on the next product and repeat. It can easily be a treadmill to nowhere unless you get in to a high risk startup that succeeds. If you do you still have to work hard or get lucky to get a big piece of the action which requires some pretty serious social and business skills and a strong ability to watch your back, because everyone else in the startup is trying to get a bigger piece of the action too... probably at your expense.
Its just a guess but most really bright people, especially ones with good social skills, are going to be smart enough to angle for the business side of the company because they know thats generally where the money is, especially these days, because CxO's and directors almost always rake in millions a year whether they succeeded or not. Most programmers will never see that kind of money.
@de_machina