Computer Science Education
Posted on December 31, 2005 Comments (3)
The Perils of JavaSchools by Joel Spolsky:
Therein lies the debate. Years of whinging by lazy CS undergrads like me, combined with complaints from industry about how few CS majors are graduating from American universities, have taken a toll, and in the last decade a large number of otherwise perfectly good schools have gone 100% Java. It’s hip, the recruiters who use “grep” to evaluate resumes seem to like it, and, best of all, there’s nothing hard enough about Java to really weed out the programmers without the part of the brain that does pointers or recursion, so the drop-out rates are lower, and the computer science departments have more students, and bigger budgets, and all is well.
Except.
I wish they hadn’t listened.
As usually Joel wraps intelligent thought within great writing. For those interested in computer science his blog is a great resource. Also, don’t miss Paul Graham’s essays or his book: Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. Joel’s writing is also available as a book: Joel on Software. Joel has also collected relating writing: The Best Software Writing I.
3 Responses to “Computer Science Education”
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May 23rd, 2007 @ 7:54 am
“Carnegie Mellon University’s Randy Pausch…argues, many computer science departments are a quarter century behind on adapting their instructional methods for the purpose of attracting and retaining students, continuing to teach the gateway course to the field — introductory programming — just as they did 25 years ago…”
January 21st, 2008 @ 2:45 pm
“As faculty members at New York University for decades, we have regretted the introduction of Java as a first language of instruction for most computer science majors. We have seen how this choice has weakened the formation of our students…”
January 2nd, 2009 @ 2:01 pm
Though your post is from a while ago about the perils of Java Schools, it holds true for my country India now in 2008 and 2009. We are now regretting the introduction of Java as a first language pretty much from high school to college and with 9 year olds becoming Java certified and microsoft certified professionals, we are loosing the real programmers.