[Edu-sig] Low Enrollments - programming as anit-intellectualism. anit-intellectualism.

[Toby Donaldson]

> Without a question (IMO) - the least interesting section of the bookstore
> was the Computer area.  Hundreds of how-tos on the commercial technologies
> currently hot. The end.
>
> Nothing worth talking about that precedes the current hot technologies - one
> would conclude from the book selection.
>
> Why would anyone spend $40,000 a year to study how-tos of technologies that
> will be obsolete by the time they are 30 - if not before.
>
> Its not even in the running as something worth considering.
>
> I am no more an intellectual than I am a comedian. But give me a good
> stand-up, or a facile, learned mind to try to follow and digest.
>
> Programming as an academic subject area is *way*, *way* off track  - to the
> extent my little browse of yesterday was indicative of anything - which I do
> believe it was.
>
> Art

The economics section of my local big bookstore seems to be far more
of a travesty than the technology section (which does have a number of
"deeper" books that are only of interest to CS people --- the same
copies are there *every* time I go).

I think CS has many similarities to economics.

Roughly, both CS and economics have a theory side, and an *extremely*
practical applied side. In the extreme, theoreticians in both fields
are embarassed by the "uneducated" practitioners, and the
practitioners shake their head at the obvious irrelevance of so much
theory.

Theory and practice both influence each other in a feedback loop. And
both fields have a love-hate relationship with mathematics. Do working
economists ever take derivatives? Do working programmers ever use
L'Hopital's rule to compare algorithm performance? Is it because
practitioners dislike mathematics? Or is it that the mathematics isn't
actually practical?

I don't worry too much about the people who go into CS expecting
vocational training --- such people can very happily be steered
towards excellent technical training outside of universities. But I
suspect that CS is often a let-down to students who expect it to be as
relevant as, say, engineering or business --- especially if they take
any AI courses. :-)

Toby
--
Dr. Toby Donaldson
School of Computing Science
Simon Fraser University (Surrey)