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From: rcc@imsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: Teaching programming - aaack
Message-ID: <195@imsvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 20-Jun-84 12:34:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: imsvax.195
Posted: Wed Jun 20 12:34:53 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 22-Jun-84 11:05:16 EDT
References: <678@abnjh.UUCP> <554@opus.UUCP>
Organization: IMS Inc, Rockville MD
Lines: 28

>>Beginning CS students should not only be taught simply how to program,
>>but how to reason a programming solution and to convert it into concrete
>>terms in an elegant manner.  In short, just as Prof. Kingsfield of
>>'The Paper Chase' taught his students not just contract law, but "How
>>to think like lawyers", freshman CS students should undergo a course
>>discipline that teaches them how to think like computer scientists.

>Aaack.  No, PLEASE!  If you do that we're never going to get enough
>programmers to go around.  Teach them to think like programmers, not like
>computer scientists!

Maybe, but would you trust anything more complicated than a bubble
sort (yuck, use insertion sort) to a programmer who didn't think like
a computer scientist?  It's programmers like that who popularized the
slogan "There's always one more bug..."

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