Re: Questions from my student

On Apr 21, 6:49 am, nowheref...@xxxxxxx wrote:
You can claim whatever you want. I did say that the situation I
described was "probably not the norm for most." His students could
always hope against hope to find a similar situation, but my real
recommendation was (and still is) that he tell his students to get out
of this particular field, assuming he is in the USA (but if he is in
India, for example, his students should by all means remain in the
field).

I disagree with this gloomy outlook for the careers of programmers in
Europe and North America. There will always be room for the brightest
and most talented to make a healthy living just as the best doctors,
lawyers, engineers and so on can, because computer programming is an
activity that requires a bit of brains, and even where it is more
grunt work than intelligence having some brains (and experience) can
save so much time and effort. A highly talented programmer is worth
ten mediocre outsourced ones any day. I am not being racist, as I have
met some very smart Indian programmers, often as permanent staff in
some top companies, but most Indian contractors and outsource
programmers I have encountered are not that sharp and lacking in their
education (not because they are inherently thick, but they come from a
poorer country than those of us brought up in the West and don't have
the same opportunities that we do). They know teach yourself Java in
30 days, but not Prolog, or how to write a compiler, what a hardware
interrupt is, or what an M/M/1 queuing system is.

As an example, I recall talking to an Indian contractor who started
out as an outsource programmer in India. He told me about his previous
job, where he had to write a program to find the cheapest air freight
shipping routes, over multiple hops. That sounded like an interesting
task to me, so I asked if he used some sort of A* search as that seems
the obvious first choice for the problem using distance as the crow
flies heuristic. He'd never heard of A*, and knew nothing really about
search. His solution consisted of running a query against the database
to find all routes, then taking the cheapest one. Ironically, given
the amount of computing power at our disposal these days, the
inefficiency of his solution probably didn't matter that much. Now if
this guy had know about search driven programming, not even
necessarily Prolog, at the very least he would have been able to write
a maximally efficient solution to the problem and had the satisfaction
of knowing it.

I think Prolog should be taught in Universities, and should be taught
alongside other logical programming languages. Forward chaining rule
systems definitely have industrial relevance, for example, in
insurance calculations (how exciting! if you tell them that then they
probably will switch to another major!). For the more academic
students, other logical systems, maybe HAL or other more experimental
ones with type systems or modal logics, should be taught. The ideas in
Prolog are too good for mainstream languages to ignore, and hopefully
some of the students who go on to research the area will help
incorporate these ideas into mainstream languages, making them more
easily available to the career programmer.

Rupert
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Teaching Assembly Language Programming
    ... First, assembly language wasn't part of middle school, college prep HS ... at the expense of honest or smarter students. ... Most real programmers are self taught between ages of 10 ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: The Value of a CS Degree
    ... I addressed (many of them little better than HTML programmers) were ... reporting starting salaries well above $50K. ... And I'm talking about 4-year students, ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: [OT] Java and Netscape
    ... > Your hope may be that students may be chastened and become better java ... > programmers, but the chastisement itself is not instruction. ... The average computer makes mincemeat out of the average newbie ...
    (comp.lang.java.help)
  • Re: The possibility of vms opening up?
    ... Well, Universities should skills that last beyond the first few years, but universities do get their money for giving students qualifications that can be used on the job marked for the rest of the students professional carrier. ... The best guys for designing such software might not be great programmers in Joel's mind. ... If an airplane crashes because the pilots user interface if too difficult to use, then the producer of the plane is to blame. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Is my CS instructor nuts?
    ... our first project will be an audio spectrum analyzer. ... beginning programmers? ... I had this problem with some students when I gave them an assignment to ...
    (comp.programming)