Spolsky is talking about universities teaching computer science instead of teaching a programming language. Computer science is a difficult discipline. It is founded on math & logic, and no one is claiming these are easy. Acquiring the appropriate foundational knowledge requires many difficult conceptual leaps. He argues that we should not abandon them just because they're hard. Or if we do abandon them, we shouldn't pretend it's computer science that we're teaching.

It's not as if the universities are just throwing irrelevant material at the students just because it's hard, or just to make themselves feel smart. The hard material is relevant and necessary for understanding the main results the field of computer science. A computer science degree should reflect knowledge of computer science, and I don't think that's elitist.

As for "weeding out", I think that any student who goes into a CS degree program expecting nothing but Java lessons deserves to have a rude awakening, and as early as possible (for everyone's convenience). CS may require a lot more formality and mathematical rigor than a lot of college freshman are expecting.

I'd be willing to bet that there are any number of monks who are happy and successful in programming careers who didn't bother with a jaunt through an institution that espouses Spolsky's elitist views on higher education.

It's not as if the universities are just throwing irrelevant material at the students just because it's hard, or just to make themselves feel smart.

You've never been inside an actual university, have you? :-)

I'd hardly call Joel an elitist. He's not the one designing the curriculum or teaching the classes. He didn't invent the situation. He's just observing it.

You have to remember, however, that all sorts of people have romantic notions about the work they think they want to do in life, and once confronted with reality find out they don't really like it or don't want that lifestyle. That's really all he is saying.

Don't pull out a single essay to judge anyone. Take it in light of everything else they've written. I think you'll find Joel to be a lot less elitist than you accuse him of being. It's not like he's Paul Graham, who really is elitist :)

In the school I went to, the killer classes were biology and psychology. There, the failure rate was expected to be between 25-30% with no more than 10% being A's. Every school has the killer subjects - these are the subjects the school is known for, so they get a higher proportion of freshmen taking those courses.

I don't know Joel Spolsky or where he stands, but I do know that your little excerpt is maybe 5% of his point.

He is trying to say that schools only teaching Java are doing a diservice to there students and the profession because Java makes things so easy that people without the critical thinking skills needed for programming can still pass the course.

Not having a degree, or widespread experience with other programmer i'm probably not qualified to aggree or disagree. However I took plenty of classes where there were students confused by concepts like variable, and "code", not to mention if statments or functions and subs. I would have been thrilled to have taken one of these tough classes to weed out the others so that my own experience would have been more than teaching the other kids in my class how exactly you login to a computer and run pascal. ;)

But then I'm your regular home brew hacker and think that anyone who needs taught computers probably doesn't realy want to work on them. In my experience programming and logic are things you just have to inherently have and they can't realy be taught (/me sat throw several 'logic' classes and watched many people consistently not get it). Maybe I'm wrong, dunno. Either way your critical analysis of this "worst blog ever" realy sucked and lacked any basis or argument. So, if you insist on posting something with such a title, please back it up with some content and critical thinking of your own.

Successful autodidacts would any of them handle the course material just fine. They may not have got along with a teacher, but a student can always find another teacher.

One of the advantages of a good education is that it teaches you to autodiddum without believing everything you read. If it doesn't teach that, it's not a good education.

I agree with you. I tend to see teachers ideally as facilitators of learning or as mentors. Raw information can be had from books
and other sources. A teacher should provide guidance and encouragement.

The whole concept of introductory courses as "weed-out's" is repellent to me.

The whole concept of introductory courses as "weed-out's" is repellent to me.

How about the concept of intermediate courses as "weed-outs?" At some point, you have to separate the ones who are serious about the subject and those who are just there because they don't know what they want to do for a career. Better to find out sooner than later. I was "weeded out" from the accounting major by the time i hit junior level and let me tell you, i am very thankful for that.

The only thing i find "repellent" about "weed-out" courses is when i am required to take one in my minor field. Other than that, a teacher can only provide so much guidance and encouragement -- they simply cannot be expected to do the work for the student.

You know what they call weed-out courses in the real world? "You're fired!"

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

Bottom line though, I mostly agree with him - introductory programming courses are a good way to weed out the people who aren't commmited to getting a programming degree. What sort of person fails an introductory programming course? The sort of person who should be majoring in something else. Assuming your textbook is reasonably adequate, you have no excuse for failure.

They all assume you'll be doing wierd, theoretical work, preferably, in CS grad school.

You see, you might need calculus for non-linear optimization work, and you might need linear algebra and field theory if you decide to go into crytography research. So everyone has to take it.

And if you decide to just do a job doing boring, practical things like writing programs that work, instead of clever, abstract things like proving neat, theoretical boundries on toy problems for systems that can never actually exist in the real world, you're derided for not being clever and abstract and academic enough.

I don't know how many young kids I've seen wander out of a CS degree thinking a Turing Machine is Something Important(TM), as applied in the real world. They think that constants are irrelevant, because they learned order notation, but didn't learn quite enough.

In reality, all those boring little constants in front of your abstract little order notation symbols mean the difference between "highly profitable" and "completely worthless". In the real world, people need constant time speedup: and the difference between running in twenty minutes and running in a hour can make or break a program. In the real world, you worry about the scalablity of your algorithm only after it meets the inital performance requirements to begin with. If the the hardware to make the problem fast is too expensive to do what the business requires, it's a no go, no matter how much nicer your algorithm scales "towards infinity".

I don't know how many people have tried to use "Turing completeness" as a way to explain what a computer can or can't do, and gibber on and on about halting problems and so forth. It's far simpler than that: any computer you find in the real world will have finite memory, finite run time, and finite amount of cash available to construct and run it. No computer can do more than a finite state machine can, if only for reasons of economics. But finite state machines are boring, and we don't have a neat paradox for them, so I'm left listening to boring undergrads drone on and on about "undecidablity" as if it's a real world problem...

When they get to the real world, they'll learn that no one else cares about CS theory. No one else cares about whether P=NP. They just want the billing system to run, the accounting ledgers to add up, and the reports to look pretty, with colourful graphs that show the wiggly line going upward. If you do what the rest of the world needs, you get paid; if you don't, you don't.

Universities are largely in the business of training grad students to become professors; any other education they provide is mostly just incidental.
--
Ytrew

Understanding the concept of a Turing machine is actually quite important in real-world programming. A little digression -

Nearly everyone on this site will be able to point to an experience in their careers where they wrote something in Perl and it took them a couple days. Turned out to be really really useful and the PHB had it rewritten in Java. Took 15 people 6 months and it still doesn't work right.

Why is that? Perl isn't inherently a better language than Java. In fact, there are many things Java has better support for than Perl. However, Java projects generally take longer than the equivalent Perl projects and generally require more people.

My feeling is that Perl programmers tend to be more capable than Java programmers, precisely because we tend to have a stronger grasp of the fundamentals. Things like a Turing machine. In fact, I once implemented a Turing machine in production code because it was the correct and cost-effective solution to the requirements. It's easy to deride the theoreticals, but they're extremely useful, just not as presented. You actually have to think about how to apply them. :-p

---

My criteria for good software:

1. Does it work?
2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

When they get to the real world, they'll learn that no one else cares about CS theory. No one else cares about whether P=NP. They just want the billing system to run, the accounting ledgers to add up, and the reports to look pretty, with colourful graphs that show the wiggly line going upward. If you do what the rest of the world needs, you get paid; if you don't, you don't.

True.

Of course sometimes knowing about N=NP, big O notation, etc. is exactly what you need to get the job done.

I've encountered my fair share of fresh CS graduates who think they know everything and are terrible at their job. The thing is I've also encountered my fair share of non-graduates who've been working in the industry for years and think they know everything and are terrible at their job. I think a lot of this has to do with the person - rather than whether they come from an academic or industry background.

Universities are largely in the business of training grad students to become professors; any other education they provide is mostly just incidental.

Back when I was at uni I remember being taught tons of purely "academic" content. People I knew who were working in industry told me I'd never use it in the real world. Silly things like object orientation, virtual machines and garbage collection.

I certainly don't think a university education provides you will all of the skills needed to do the job. I'm actually glad that they don't since I don't think universities should be in the job of just vocational education. They do provide a bunch of useful skills though. IMHO as ever ;-)

Exactly.

The most succinct encapsulation I've seen of your oh so eloquant dissertation above, is something I read in someone tag line somewhere. From memory it went something like:

In theory, theory is enough. In practice, it isn't!

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Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

I don't know. Some student problems are the fault of the teachers, but on the other hand, many students are just lazy and don't work hard enough on courses they consider "too difficult".

You're 100% correct there!

When I took my first Perl course a few years back, one of the people in the class was balking at figuring out a simple program to calculate the volume of a planet, given the variables needed to do the calculation. And this was one of the first assignments!

Fortunately, that was an isolated incident and that person dropped from the course within a couple of meetings.

Useless trivia: In the 2004 Las Vegas phone book there are approximately 28 pages of ads for massage, but almost 200 for lawyers.

I take it you would not be keen on my proposed course, "Freshman Diligence Seminar", a mandatory seventeen-hour course (3 hrs Mon-Fri plus 2 hrs Saturday) for first-semester Freshmen, designed to impart the skills needed to succeed in college (e.g., verbatim memorization, good note-taking, library research, the ability to wade through voluminous quantites of collateral reading, and the ability to put down what one has learned in writing in a little blue book on short notice).

Okay, so I'm not 100% serious with that (albeit, I'm not 100% in jest, either). What I *really* think all college students should be required to take, that most schools unfortunately do not require, is a course in logic.

What I *really* think all college students should be required to take, that most schools unfortunately do not require, is a course in logic.

When I was an undergrad at RPI, the Symbolic Logic course was grouped with the Philosophy courses, and so it met the humanities credit distribution requirement. Everyone took symbolic logic. :-)

Symbolic logic isn't really what I had in mind. I was thinking a traditional logic course, covering inductive and deductive reasonings, components of an argument (premeses, conclusions, and so forth), common logical fallacies, and the like -- basically the ability to distinguish between valid reasoning and nonsense. Though, symbolic logic also would not go amiss.

This can be true, but often it is not the current teacher's fault, but a previous teacher the student had. In high school I breezed through math and even took beginning Calculus concurrently at college. I found out that my Trig knowledge was woefully deficient and soon hit a brick wall in the second semester when the two were combined. That wasn't the Calculus teacher's fault, but it was too late by then. I don't think the Calculus teacher should have slowed the class down to my level just because of an inept high school education -- that would have been unfair to the rest of the class.

I made a personal decision not to be weeded out. I believed that I could indeed handle the mental challenge, I just didn't have a good foundation at the time. Sadly, there *are* people that can't handle the mental challenge, no matter the previous foundation. I believe he's just saying these folks should find something else -- I really doubt he'd say you'd have to get it 100% right the first time.

I'd be willing to bet that there are any number of monks who are happy and successful in programming careers who didn't bother with a jaunt through an institution that espouses Spolsky's elitist views on higher education.

I think what you really want to find is monks that are happy and successful that didn't go to school and that don't have the ability to understand C pointers and other fundamental CS concepts even after repeated attempts. I'm not saying these folks don't exist, but I'd like to see an example. Of course I don't think anyone really understands automata theory, for more than 5 minutes at a time ...

You can implement that with pack/unpack if you want. (Look for the p/P options.)