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[UPDATE 20191112_223013 UTC: Per original author's request, I hereby note this is an edited excerpt and not an exact quote from the blog post linked below. --martyb]
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe
Jan Schauma recently posted a list of one hundred Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating. There is much good fun here, especially for a prof who tries to help CS students get ready for the world, and a fair amount of truth, too. I will limit my brief comments to three items that have been on my mind recently even before reading this list.
18. 'Email' and 'Gmail' are synonymous.
CS grads are users, too, and their use of Gmail, and systems modeled after it, contributes to the truths of modern email: top posting all the time, with never a thought of trimming anything. Two-line messages sitting atop icebergs of text which will never be read again, only stored in the seemingly infinite space given us for free.
38. Employers care about which courses they took.
It's the time of year when students register for spring semester courses, so I've been meeting with a lot of students. (Twice as many as usual, covering for a colleague on sabbatical.) It's interesting to encounter students on both ends of the continuum between not caring at all what courses they take and caring a bit too much. The former are so incurious I wonder how they fell into the major at all. The latter are often more curious but sometimes are captive to the idea that they must, must, must take a specific course, even if it meets at a time they can't attend or is full by the time they register.
90. Two people with a CS degree will have a very similar background and shared experience/knowledge.
This falsehood operates in a similar space to #38, but at the global level I reached at the end of my previous paragraph. Even students who take most of the same courses together will usually end their four years in the program with very different knowledge and experiences.
The complete list is available at www.netmeister.org.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mth on Tuesday November 12 2019, @01:30PM (9 children)
The following are listed as falsehoods, but in my opinion they're not false in general:
All debugging is inefficient, but in my experience logging (which printf statements are a primitive form of) is often a more efficient way of debugging than single-stepping.
Of course adding color doesn't automatically improve readability, but if used well, I do think colorized output is easier to understand than monochrome text.
While there is merit to having non-technical courses in the curriculum, some of the ones I took about 20 years ago turned out to indeed be a waste of time. So maybe this sentiment shouldn't be dismissed as the students being short-sighted but instead they should check whether those courses are indeed teaching useful skills and/or insights.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:10PM (3 children)
I agree, #28 shouldn't be considered a "must" but selective use of color can improve readability. Unless it is a dark blue on a black background, that is the opposite of helpful.
#78, it's too blanket a statement to be useful. Humanities have their purposes, but it's not universal. I studied Logic in the Philosophy department in college and it was very good at showing how to make arguments; the teacher even observed he had a lot of comp-sci students and occasionally went on tangents of things we might find useful. At the same time, I had an English class that was basically "popular film criticism" which was sort of useless as we just discussed subjective things pointlessly (it was more "this movie's plot was bad because I don't like plots centered on saving the world" vs. the potentially more thoughtful "let us discuss how this movie attempts to make a specific point but inadvertently appears to provide proof of the opposite").
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @07:38PM (2 children)
I teach Logic at a local university. My current intro class is about 1/3 engineers, 1/3 CS, and 1/3 everyone else (mostly Philosophy or legal studies). I make sure I cover things like set theory and Venn Diagrams, fuzzy logic, N-order logic, many-sorted logic, modal logic, and many-valued logic (after experimenting with different systems, I'm thinking of sticking with the functionally-complete version of ternary SQL logic as the most applicable and easily understandable). Each of those has direct implications to the CS and engineering fields, even if the students don't see that from the ground.
If any of you have any suggestions as to what to add to my curriculum or tweaks to make, I'd appreciate them. Specifically, what did you find helpful when you learned them, or what do you wish you'd learned earlier? Any insight would be appreciated, as most who take the class are not Philosophy majors but I, obviously, have a Philosophy background, so do not share the same background or training.
And no, Steve, if you see this, I'm not teaching them that crazy IEEE logic you want in an intro course!
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday November 14 2019, @07:22PM (1 child)
I am not an expert in computer science, i went to college for it but what I learned was I am not an expert to the level I should be teaching it, hahaha.
I'd advise having a chat with the computer science professors sometime. They'd know better than a chump like me. Find one that recognizes how important philosophy is - it's hard to tell with a casual glance in my experience, have to talk to them.
At my college the administration liked to have a "Science vs Humanities" power struggle and force them to compete for resources, so they didn't get along well mostly, but that's stupid. I lucked out and got a professor that recognized it was stupid as an advisor. They don't exist without each other. They should get along.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14 2019, @07:29PM
That was a general invitation for everyone for general ideas but was spurred because you sounded like you had a few. I do talk to the different departments (mathematics, EE, and CS, to name the big ones) and that is why I include some of the things I do. Those hacking their way through the trees with a machete want to know what food is poisonous and animals are venomous. Meanwhile, when you look down from the ivory tower, you can only see the forest and sometimes forget it is made out more than trees.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:10PM (2 children)
I think the last item should be amended to be correct: MANY university requirements, technical and non-technical, are a waste of time.
One class that is NOT a waste of time is TECHNICAL WRITING.
It's completely different from the usual writing students are taught their entire academic careers: essays, literary analysis, long papers.
I work with a sea of millennials and it's obvious that they desperately need this skill.
(Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Tuesday November 12 2019, @03:02PM
I agree. Though, I see bad writing from all ages. Also, I see dumb people. Finally, Technical Writing IS a CS degree requirement in most places these days. It wasn't back in my day.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday November 12 2019, @03:17PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @04:45PM
Ah ha...found the M$ programmer!!
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:59AM
I disagreed with these:
I don't always use exactly that but a dark or warm background makes for a good night mode so it's easier to get to sleep. And anyway, everyone knows it's amber on black. ;)
Well these days the '.1' will probably be buggy too.
This was a good one though:
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?