cramer@kontron.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) (03/05/86)
1. Let me cast my vote for an introductory language to computer science for Pascal. I would NEVER produce a real product in Pascal, but when I think back to my first real program in C, fighting its counterintuitive syntax for pointer referencing, its curiously inconsistent type checking (at least on some compilers), and its' general crypticness, I shudder to think of some poor freshman having to deal with linked lists, trees, and something like a real application while simultaneously fighting with C. 2. The value of a Computer Science degree. Let me start out by explaining that I was majoring in chemistry when I ran out of money, and had to get a job. Fortunately, I had been a "hacker" back when we thought we were in seventh heaven because we got a 300 baud terminal to hook up to a 64K timeshared minicomputer, and I was able to get my first full-time job in less than two days. I have gone back to school several times, getting in a class here, and a class there. (I believe I will call me education "distributed computer science".) Fortunately, almost everything I need to know for my current job I learned on my own in high school -- what little I learned formally was in first year Pascal at Sonoma State University, north of San Francisco. I have something to say that is likely to be no surprise to many of you -- there are few jobs for computer scientists -- there's a lot of jobs for programmers and software engineers. An adequate education for software engineering should, in my estimate, include the following classes: 1. symbolic logic (also useful for recognizing political nonsense as such) 2. Pascal as a method of teaching data structures 3. C (so you can do useful work) 4. assembly language (with a hardware oriented product -- perhaps something involving process control) 5. an introduction to mainframe DBMS systems 6. a class devoted to debugging techniques, with an emphasis on debugging using nothing more than printf statements in C (it sure hurts to watch a guy spoiled by debuggers like dbx have to use PC-DOS DEBUG to chase down a problem with a crazed pointer scrambling the operating system) I am inclined to agree that the hacker content of CS grads seems to be going down. A lot of kids started seeing $$$ in the late 1970s and early 1980s and went into CS for no better reason. This, I think, produces a lot of CS graduates that I won't hire because this is just a job.