From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,88ed72d98e6b3457 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-11-03 09:07:45 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newshub.sdsu.edu!elnk-nf2-pas!elnk-pas-nf1!newsfeed.earthlink.net!border2.nntp.ash.giganews.com!border1.nntp.ash.giganews.com!firehose2!nntp4!intern1.nntp.aus1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!nntp.comcast.com!news.comcast.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2003 11:07:43 -0600 Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2003 12:07:42 -0500 From: "Robert I. Eachus" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Standard Library Interest? References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.34.214.193 X-Trace: sv3-UMJMkAR8YjjOCOVE7BX+mlPSUpHnCb86zcfiVWZKkabL7TuHn8yXI6jamjgWbhjIFwezUCCCu28ld3E!npEIGcvcqI8hDlth4Vu9PpyIRM7j4RMiSj+vSUxgpbnchTWDebSwmGS086YgGA== X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-DMCA-Complaints-To: dmca@comcast.net X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.1 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:2001 Date: 2003-11-03T12:07:42-05:00 List-Id: 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.