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 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 04:11:05 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!wn14feed!worldnet.att.net!204.127.198.203!attbi_feed3!attbi_feed4!attbi.com!attbi_s01.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Jeff C," Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: Subject: Re: Standard Library Interest? X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.34.215.119 X-Complaints-To: abuse@comcast.net X-Trace: attbi_s01 1067861464 24.34.215.119 (Mon, 03 Nov 2003 12:11:04 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2003 12:11:04 GMT Organization: Comcast Online Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2003 12:11:04 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1962 Date: 2003-11-03T12:11:04+00:00 List-Id: "Robert I. Eachus" 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.