Re: No top schools use Ada

[Ian S Nelson <bonovox+@CMU.EDU>]

Excerpts from mail: 19-Apr-95 Re: No top schools use Ada by Robert
Dewar@GNAT.CS.NYU 
> if computer scientists and schools teaching computer science are happy to
> make it clear to their students, and the prospective employers of their
> students that computer science is quite different from software engineering
> and that they should look elsewhere if their goal is to become or hire
> competent programmers, that would be helpful!

Most certainly... In fact I wished they told me that before I got here..
 Actually, CMU is a pretty good SE school too, you just have to put up
with the boring stuff (prog languages 15-312, compilers, OSes, etc..)
before you can take the SE classes. I don't know hardly anyone who
wishes to be a "computer scientist" they stress proofs and functional
programming too much, anything useful is usually far too large to prove
and functional programming just isn't fun. ("hmmm, let's use a lot of
recursion to make this hard to read, but we came *prove it*") I don't
know how many projects I've seen come out of the labs in LISP and the
first thing done to them by the programmers is to convert it into C++,
it's almost like it is part of the scientific design process.
 
Anyways, why would MIT, CMU and Stanford say that they don't produce
software engineers and lose all that money they make?  
--
Ian S. Nelson  <bonovox@cmu.edu>                  finger for PGP key
Carnegie Mellon Computer Science/Math    
Home Page:http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/in22/ian.html
My opinions are not the school's, although they should be!