Mark Guzdial at ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) writes:
I have three reasons for thinking that learning CS is different than learning other STEM disciplines.
- Our infrastructure for teaching CS is younger, smaller, and weaker;
- We don't realize how hard learning to program is;
- CS is so valuable that it changes the affective components of learning.
The author makes compelling arguments to support the claims, ending with:
We are increasingly finding that the emotional component of learning computing (e.g., motivation, feeling of belonging, self-efficacy) is among the most critical variables. When you put more and more students in a high-pressure, competitive setting, and some of whom feel "like" the teacher and some don't, you get emotional complexity that is unlike any other STEM discipline. Not mathematics, any of the sciences, or any of the engineering disciplines are facing growing numbers of majors and non-majors at the same time. That makes learning CS different and harder.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday January 11 2018, @04:01PM
The old saw that you can have an amazing rockstar programmer whose fingers produce source code of breathtaking efficiency, and yet when he leaves the company/retires/dies and nobody else can understand what he wrote it all gets thrown out or fucked up by his successors.
Better to have a team of good but not spectacular developers who get the job done and document everything with less-imaginative source code.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"