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How Computer Science Education Got Practical (Again)
jfruh writes: In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of young people who had grown up tinkering with PCs hit college and dove into curricula designed around the vague notion that they might want to "do something with computers." Today, computer science education is a lot more practical — though in many ways that's just going back to the discipline's roots. As Christopher Mims put it in the Wall Street Journal, "we've entered an age in which demanding that every programmer has a degree is like asking every bricklayer to have a background in architectural engineering."
Many of those large spreadsheets would be much better off as a database and a little bit of scripting language like Python. But most of these business analysts have only ever had exposure to Excel and VBA, and they would have been much better served with some technical training in the right tool for the job.
I agree with you, but, in my experience, the biggest single obstacle to deploying better tools is the IT department.
I'm an accountant, not a programmer (although my degree was a Computer Science joint honours 25 years ago) and I find that while Excel is great for some things, I prefer to us R for most data and financial analysis. But my IT department gets jumpy about R: We don't understand it! We can't support it! We don't understand its dependencies! If it stops working one day, we won't be able to help! Where will we find skilled resources if you leave the business?
"Fine," I say. "Give me C# or Python; I'll use those instead." But then I'm told I'm not allowed those tools because they're too dangerous and restricted to IT staff to maintain proper control. This hasn't just happened in one company - it's the normal response in my experience.