Re: Software Engineering Education

[world!srctran@uunet.uu.net (Gregory Aharonian)]

     The various suggestions for how to grade software products, while nice,
don't reflect that in the real world of deadlines and tight budgets, one
rarely has the luxury (or the ability to plead for cost over-runs) to do
software nicely in the software engineering sense.
     Languages like C/++ are frequently chosen in the real world for products
because it is easier to write 'bad' programs in the required time with C than
it is to a write the same program 'badly' in Ada.  There is a program I now
use on my PC, GeoWorks, that is a simple, decently implemented of what
Windows should be.  The program has received much praise.  From what I know,
the program is written mostly in assembler, with some C.  I doubt highly,
given the time, budget, and memory constraints, that this program could have
been written in Ada, and if the source code was evaluated by the proposed
academic criteria, probably would not receive a good grade. Yet the product,
albeit with annoying bugs, is a good product.
     The question should be how much of the real world show students be
taught about?  It is beneficial to teach them to program in a way that is
possible only at the few companies in the real world lucky or smart enough
to have great software development environments?

Greg Aharonian
Source Translation & Optimization