Re: Great SWT Program

On Oct 14, 9:27 am, Patricia Shanahan <p...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
bbo...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Oct 13, 1:47 pm, blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <blm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think so -- if we're talking about people enrolled in a degree
program in computer science. In my opinion, the goal of such
programs should be to turn out people who know how to learn, not
people trained in today's hot languages/technologies/whatever.

It should be to teach people how to program, should it not? Language-
independence I'm all for; teach them general algorithm, data
structure, OO, and such concepts, and generally-applicable debugging,
etc. techniques.

...

Teaching how to program should be part of a computer science course,
just as teaching about geography should be part of a geography course.
However, all university courses, regardless of nominal topic, are
supposed to teach how to think and learn, and those are the really
important skills.

Note that I suggested teaching programming skills that will outlast
any specific programming language. As for "thinking and learning", I
don't see that exposure to awkward and obsolete UIs helps much with
that. More likely, such an interface gets in the way of doing what
you're really there to do. Trying to program and (especially) debug
will do a lot to teach thinking and problem-solving skills, and
working with new APIs or languages a few times will help with the "how
to learn" part. Reading the documentation and googling are two of the
major skills here, but will tend to get instilled anyway.

However, having a student attempt to do something through a narrow and
clunky and oddball interface won't teach them anything but what
frustration feels like, I expect. And it will drastically slow down
everything else in the meantime.

.

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