NYCPHP Meetup

[Christopher R. Merlo]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 11:46 AM, Justin Dearing <zippy1981 at gmail.com>wrote:

Personally, I think that at some point in college the following should be
> taught to CompSci, MIS/IT, Engineering and Finance majors:
> * How to code
> * How to use source control (presented to IT in a way that covers devops,
> storing config files, and how sharepoint and wiki's work)
>
> I do think they need to be taught in isolation. I do think that CompSci
> majors should understand unit testing, and that unit testing frameworks are
> good for engineering and finance. If you've ever seen anyone use a unit
> testing framework to show their code demo's, you'd see what I mean.
>
> I think its a problem that we don't teach revision control in school. I
> think that it should be taught early enough in the curriculum that you'd
> learn it even if you just go for an associates degree. I don't think it
> should happen in the same class as when you learn what a for loop is.
>

Justin is, as usual, correct about all of this.  But as someone who's been
involved in CS curriculum design at the associates level for going on 12
years now, the problem -- at least for us at the community college level --
is that we can only make our students take 66 credits, of physics and music
and English and all the other stuff, along with CS and math.  I would love
to offer our CS students a course on these software engineering topics,
like source control and unit tests and how to do a code review, but not at
the expense of assembly or linear algebra, and SUNY won't let us do it at
the expense of sociology or art.  (That's not a complaint; I think the
curriculum *should* be well-rounded.  We just don't have space.)
-c
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