Teaching Programming

The aim is to instill a degree of professionalism; to get to the point where the students can write software suitable for the use by others than themselves.
(...)
You cannot be a professional in the IT field while being comfortable in only one language.
(...)
There is another enrollment problem that’s endemic: Not enough women choose computer science. If – as in some technical fields – women were about 50% of the students, we’d probably have the opposite enrollment problem: we’d have to cut back by raising standards! I do not know why (though I suspect I have heard all the popular explanations), but CS seems particularly unattractive to women entering university – throughout the US and Europe and beyond.

That’s a bleeding shame for CS; the field seems to have become steadily worse at recruiting women since 1980 or so while other areas of study, including math, biology, medicine, and some branches of engineering have done better. I’d love to help reverse that trend. For starters we should have a more serious discussion of the problem.
(...)
Programming is part of software development. It doesn’t matter how fancy your code is unless it solves the right problem and you can explain it to others. So, brush up on your communication skills. Learn to listen, to ask good questions, to write clearly, and to present clearly. Serious programming is a team sport, brush up on your social skills. The sloppy fat geek computer genius semi-buried in a pile of pizza boxes and cola cans is a mythical creature, best buried deep, never to be seen again.

Learn your first language well. That means trying it for difficult tasks. Don’t obsess about technical details. Focus on techniques and principles.

Learn another programming language; choose any language that’s quite different from what you are best acquainted with. You can’t be a professional in the IT world knowing only one language. No one language is the best for everyone and for everything.

Don’t just do programming. Computing is always computing something. Become acquainted with something that requires your software development skills: Mediaeval history, car engine design, rocket science, medical blood analysis, image processing, computational geometry, biological modeling, whatever seems interesting. Yes, all of these examples are real, from my personal experience.

Bjarne Stroustrup on Educating Software Developers
By James Maguire
December 9, 200

FALTEN INFORMÀTICS

FALTEN ENGINYERS

Cada any es titulen més pocs enginyers al nostre país, i les empreses de tecnologies de la informació s'exclamen que tenen dificultats per a contractar personal qualificat. Les escoles i facultats d'enginyeria superior de telecomunicacions i informàtica del país han perdut un 26% d'estudiants de nou ingrés, aquests últims dos anys. En aquest reportatge de VilaWeb TV, estudiants, professors i responsables de la Generalitat parlen de la situació.

Google's Engineering Process

At Google, python is one of the 3 "official languages" alongside with C++ and Java. Official here means that Googlers are allowed to deploy these languages to production services. (Internally Google people use many technologies including PHP, C#, Ruby and Perl). Python is well suited to the engineering process at Google. The typical project at Google has a small team (3 people) and a short duration (3 months). After a project is completed developers may move to other projects. Larger projects are sub-divided into 3 month deliverables, and teams get to choose their own language for their project. Engineers are given their 20% time to work on what they want to at Google. Many new ideas spring from this 20% work, and "bottom up" seems to be the mantra at Google.

(From http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdforum.htm)

The cost of a gigabyte of computer memory, over time.

1956 | $10 million
1980 | $233,000
1990 | $7,700
2000 | $13.30
2006 | $1

Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

An interesting view of our students

by Michael Wesch and ANTH 200 Spring 2007
http://mediatedcultures.net/mediatedculture.htm