Re: Great SWT Program

In article <1192472640.838959.262790@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<bbound@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 14, 9:27 am, Patricia Shanahan <p...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
bbo...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

[ snip ]

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.

Maybe. Then again, programming with an IDE rather obscures the
fact that source code is plain text, converted to object code and
then an executable with a compiler. But the department where
I teach seems to focus more than some do on having students
understand what's happening at a fairly low level. Whether in
the long run that's better or worse than focusing solely, or
almost solely, on something higher-level .... I don't know.

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.

--
B. L. Massingill
ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Where do you put your eight?
    ... I blew that one in the interview. ... skills chart showing various relevant skills, ... prospective employers can easily determine if the candidate is a good ... even though I had no prior knowledge of computer programming ...
    (rec.games.frp.dnd)
  • Re: programming job market in bay area in US
    ... software programming whatsoever and is near enough that I'd be able to ... I have excellent general software development skills, ... bitmapped/raster images to construct parameterizations of them. ...
    (comp.programming)
  • RE: Programming skills for Pen Testers
    ... First just to get this in C programming is a good skill. ... How can anyone here honestly state that programming skills are needed ... Audit your website security with Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner: ... Up to 75% of cyber attacks are launched on shopping carts, ...
    (Pen-Test)
  • Re: Top Turds of comp.lang.perl.misc (2007)
    ... EJ> If bad programming makes a person a horrible person, ... the perl community has coders of many skill ranges. ... skills to even judge that and you think we are crazy for denigrating its ...
    (comp.lang.perl.misc)
  • Software Engineer, C, Cambridge
    ... Software Engineer/Senior Software Engineer ... The ideal candidate will have the following skills and experience: ... Experience of cross-platform programming in Unix and Windows ... Linguamatics Ltd develops software products based on ...
    (uk.jobs.offered)