A proper appeal: computer science curricula

[banazir]

I was going to call this "An Immodest Proposal" or "A Proper Rant", but as you well know, I'm too much of a pragmatist not to get straight down to brass tacks on this subject.

I've been thinking - not just this morning, nor only this past week, but really this whole semester - about what we need to get some foundations of mathematics and

Comments

Re: Use it or lose it

[gregbo]

"I think a lot of the things listed above should be used, and where it isn't, we get shoddy (faulty or poorly-designed and hard-to-maintain, hard-to-extend) software."

In my experience, software projects don't fall apart because of a lack of, or misapplied CS theory. Rather, it is because of poor planning and/or communication. Bad code gets written because there isn't time allocated to write good code. Inadequate testing is performed because management insists the software go out the door to satisfy bean counters. Items fall through the cracks because there isn't adequate discussion of the issues.

As for using certain things in a CS curriculum, from a practical standpoint, most people are not going to work on enough projects that touch on all they learned. For example, I hardly remember any linear algebra, despite doing very well in it, and enjoying it quite a lot. There simply hasn't been a project I've worked on that has used any. It isn't even a matter of me not caring about the subject (I do); it's just that there's been no need for it, and a need for various other things that have taken much higher priority.