Re: Standard Library Interest?

["Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net>]

Jeff C, wrote:

> The professor would mark up the code (somewhat like a peer
> inspection) and also
> gave you and audio tape from the session where he would comment about all
> aspects of the code as
> he read it. It was VERY useful. Between the in-class examples and this
> accelerated trial by fire (which
> at the time burned out about 1/2 to 1/3 of the majors). 
> So, I think it can be done......Granted there will still be aspects that can
> not be (or at least were not) taught well but
> I think it is possible to do a decent job at this.

First, sounds like at least one professor was trying to do mentoring for 
fairly large classes.  But second, your 1/3 to 1/2 of the majors "burned 
out" is exactly the inefficiency I am complaining about.  A process that 
  wastes two or three years of both student and professor time is no 
paragon of efficiency.  When I have done mentoring, it took about a day 
to figure out whether a particular mentoree was suited for the task. 
(In a couple of cases incidently, I was able to pass the person off to 
someone who was an expert in another domain that more suited the co-op's 
personality.  In one case, it was to a DBMS project, in the other from a 
compiler front-end/language theory/parsing project to a 
code-generation/pattern matching project.

> Oh yeah.....Until the professor that seemed to be pushing all of this stuff
> left the school, Ada was the pimary language.
> I imagine by now things have degenerated into the standard CS assignments..
> 
> "A bank wants you to build a database using a B-tree.."
> 
> or the 21st century version:
> 
> "A major coorporation wants you to write custom security patches for their
> ASP based webserver" - Cha- ching..Perpetual job security.

The fate, as far as I can tell of all decent university software 
programs.  Don't get me wrong, the collegiate environment is fine for 
turning out programmers.  But "fresh outs" with no software engineering 
mentoring are potential apprentices, not journeymen software engineers. 
  The qualification is because I have had excellent experience both with 
hiring students who when through a co-op program, and with mentoring 
co-op students.  In fact, I would often choose a WPI co-op student over 
a current employee for a job that required software engineering, not 
programming.  (More of my involvement required at first, but usually a 
much better result.)

-- 

                                           Robert I. Eachus

100% Ada, no bugs--the only way to create software.