11 Jul 2000 ahosey   » (Journeyer)

Chris and I have started talking about making McFeely use CORBA. CORBA is becoming one of those things about which I kick myself for not using earlier. It reminds me of this one time: One of my first jobs while still in college was building an "interactive website" back when such things were still novel. We kept the user account data in text files, and it sucked, and then one day I discovered SQL...

Should these sorts of things be part of a college undergraduate education? i.e. "This is SQL, this is when you want to use SQL. This is CORBA, this is when you want to use CORBA." I've heard it both ways. One side which asserts that schools of higher learning in computer science should be teaching theory - algorithms, good program practice, discrete math, etc - things which are timeless, and things which are forward looking. Teaching specific contemporary implementations reduces your higher education to a vocational school.

On the other hand, the result of this, as far as I've seen, is many BS graduates who can do big-O analysis in their sleep but can't write SQL. Unless they took the Advanced Database course, in which case they didn't take the Operating Systems course and so they don't know what a page fault is.

Maybe there's just too much to possibly cover it all in a single undergraduate education.

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!