Re: Standard Library Interest?

["Jeff C," <nolongersafeto@userealemailsniff.com>]

"Robert I. Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:EOqdnSsRiKMNaDiiRVn-iQ@comcast.com...
> Alexandre E. Kopilovitch wrote:
> I've seen and participated in attempts to teach software engineering as
> an academic discipline.  It doesn't work as such.  In practice there are
> several universities in this area that have good work-study programs,
> and when a lucky student does get a good mentor, it works well.  But as
> far as degrees and curricula are concerned they have little to do with a
> student's success or failure in the co-op part of the program.
>

It has been 11+ years since I was in college but I would say that for the
most
part the program I was in really did try to work toward the goal of creating
software engineers and not just "programmers" or "CS Majors".

In general, a program that compiled and executed correctly was only enough
to get
you something like a C (the grade, not the language :). The rest was based
on the structure
of the program. 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). In the higher level
classes, students got to write their
own requirements documents for the large complicated projects and were then
evaluated at how well they
met those requirements.

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.

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.