I think you are right by saying "This doesn't mean CS is dead.", but I think for a lot more reasons than those that have been mentioned here.
First of all that fact, that these "packadges" are available to anyone the problems that companies are confronted with are a lot more complicated then they where 10 years ago. To solve those problems you need a good education in all different kinds of CS - simple programming was never and will never be the only part of CS !
We have accomplished to solve some more or less trivial problems and provide anybody with this solution BUT now we can try to solve much more complex things with computers. Not only Newton said: "We are standing on the shoulder of giants!"
Another reason why education is importand is, that all these systems need to be maintained, updated, expanded...
You need to know one or two things about CS to do that aswell.
I have seen how much CS and physics you need to create a "simple" component control in an assembly line in the car industrie - without CS (computer vision in particular) you wouldn't be able to ! So the more available Software solutions will be, the more specialized you need to be to solve new problems.
I think this conclusion "CS is dead!" is simply shortsighted and poorly read up on.
C, lets consider C is stuff like GTK, is not as hard to program with as it used to be ! I have done in my (poore) experience at the universitiy image processing tools in Java and they where not that slow, but I am doing now some programming for real time video processing with a gtk-lib and it is just as easy as java. A lot of work, when you need something to be done quickly, is nice in Python/Ruby/Java or whatever, but SOME parts need to be quicker than the rest. So I think the User-Part (I am talking of a little more than a simple GUI) is perfect in Python or whatever youre taste is like, but the core still needs to be done in C. And C is faster on a single core and on a double core. And since there are lots of wrapper you can use the C-powser easy with your Python. Why are discussions like that often like "It needs to be this or that, black or white, good or bad..."
Modern programming is more about combining the strength of different "tools" than finding the one and only tool.
How about hardware or tools or medicine one needs with MSWIN ?
Something to smash the thing like a huge jackhammer, instead of fdisk a big electromagnet might be usefull... Medicine ? At least something against headache and something to calm down: Panic because of all the viruses around. (Can I still dare to go online ?) What is a "first time Windows user" anyway ?
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are right by saying "This doesn't mean CS is dead.", but I think for a lot more reasons than those that have been mentioned here. First of all that fact, that these "packadges" are available to anyone the problems that companies are confronted with are a lot more complicated then they where 10 years ago. To solve those problems you need a good education in all different kinds of CS - simple programming was never and will never be the only part of CS ! We have accomplished to solve some more or less trivial problems and provide anybody with this solution BUT now we can try to solve much more complex things with computers. Not only Newton said: "We are standing on the shoulder of giants!" Another reason why education is importand is, that all these systems need to be maintained, updated, expanded... You need to know one or two things about CS to do that aswell. I have seen how much CS and physics you need to create a "simple" component control in an assembly line in the car industrie - without CS (computer vision in particular) you wouldn't be able to ! So the more available Software solutions will be, the more specialized you need to be to solve new problems. I think this conclusion "CS is dead!" is simply shortsighted and poorly read up on.
I think you hit the nail on it's head:
C, lets consider C is stuff like GTK, is not as hard to program with as it used to be ! I have done in my (poore) experience at the universitiy image processing tools in Java and they where not that slow, but I am doing now some programming for real time video processing with a gtk-lib and it is just as easy as java. A lot of work, when you need something to be done quickly, is nice in Python/Ruby/Java or whatever, but SOME parts need to be quicker than the rest. So I think the User-Part (I am talking of a little more than a simple GUI) is perfect in Python or whatever youre taste is like, but the core still needs to be done in C. And C is faster on a single core and on a double core. And since there are lots of wrapper you can use the C-powser easy with your Python. Why are discussions like that often like "It needs to be this or that, black or white, good or bad..."
Modern programming is more about combining the strength of different "tools" than finding the one and only tool.
How about hardware or tools or medicine one needs with MSWIN ?
Something to smash the thing like a huge jackhammer, instead of fdisk a big electromagnet might be usefull...
Medicine ? At least something against headache and something to calm down: Panic because of all the viruses around. (Can I still dare to go online ?) What is a "first time Windows user" anyway ?