Who Killed the Software Engineer? (Hint: It Happened in College)

Monday, 20 August 2012 | Unknown at 11:34 |

Reference :- http://www.datamation.com/career/article.php/11067_3722876_1#


I know it is a very old article, but every guy must know about it.
All those who say c language's scope is diminishing.

A conversation with Robert Dewar is enough to make you wonder about the future of the American software engineer. Dewar, a professor emeritus of computer science at New York University, believes that U.S. colleges are turning out programmers who are – there’s no nice way to say this – essentially incompetent.

To support his claim, Dewar penned a scathing broadside decrying today’s college-level computer science training. (The article was co-authored by Edmond Schonberg, also a CS professor emeritus at NYU.) Entitled Computer Science Education: Where are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?, the widely read article has prompted heated discussion throughout the tech industry.

Robert Dewar Professor emeritus, NYU

To sum up Dewar’s argument: today’s college computer science programs aren’t rigorous enough, and don’t promote in-depth thinking and problem solving. Instead, in an effort to boost enrollment, CS programs focus on easily accessible curricula, and so fail to prepare students to compete with their international peers.

One of the article’s main points (one that was misunderstood, Dewar tells me) is that the adoption of Java as a first programming language in college courses has led to this decline. Not exactly. Yes, Dewar believes that Java’s graphic libraries allow students to cobble together software without understanding the underlying source code.

But the problem with CS programs goes far beyond their focus on Java, he says.

“A lot of it is, ‘Let’s make this all more fun.’ You know, ‘Math is not fun, let’s reduce math requirements. Algorithms are not fun, let’s get rid of them. Ewww – graphic libraries, they’re fun. Let’s have people mess with libraries. And [forget] all this business about ‘command line’ – we’ll have people use nice visual interfaces where they can point and click and do fancy graphic stuff and have fun."

Dewar says his email in-box is crammed full of positive responses to his article, from students as well as employers. Many readers have thanked him for speaking up about a situation they believe needs addressing, he says.

One email was from an IT staffer who is working with a junior programmer. The older worker suggested that the young engineer check the call stack to see about a problem, but unfortunately, “he’d never heard of a call stack.”