john@nmt.edu (John Shipman) (07/25/90)
H. Conrad Cunningham (conrad@wucs1.wustl.edu) writes: +-- | CS curricula should be focussed on principles rather than specific | technologies. Emphasis should be given to concepts which cut across | several areas of technology, instead of arbitrarily breaking CS into | many technology-oriented subfields. +-- I agree that a focus on principles is what distinguishes a ``real'' degree. But when it comes to debating theory vs. practice, I will always argue for a mixture of the two, at least for our particular bachelor's program. Even for those who are strongly oriented toward theory, I recommend practical exercises as a superior way to learn the material. One who has had to rework a grammar to remove ambiguities is likely to have a much better grasp of how grammars work than someone who has only read about grammar. I feel that the New Mexico Tech bachelor's curriculum should prepare a student equally for industry or for grad school. A lot of our students aren't sure initially which way they'll go. As more of our bachelor's graduates go to industry than to grad school, I think it would be a bad idea to exclude practical material from our core program. Perhaps larger schools can afford the luxury of degrees that are oriented one way or the other. +-- | Instead of a core course on "operating systems" why not a | course on "concurrent programming". Such a course could | unify important concurrency-related concepts drawn from | operating systems, programming languages, database systems, | networks, algorithmics, computer architecture, computation | theory, etc. Couldn't such a course be more useful as well | as conceptually cleaner. +-- As it happens, concurrency takes up almost half the lectures in our OS course, starting with theory and extending through practical techniques for dealing with concurrency problems. A lot of related issues in languages, networks and architecture are discussed here and in our architecture course. -- John Shipman/Computer Science Department/New Mexico Tech/Socorro, NM 87801 (505)835-5301; john@jupiter.nmt.edu