Re: [Omaha.pm] Academic vs Production Code

[Bill Brush <bbrush@gmail.com>]

You see the same thing in a lot of disciplines.  Computer sys admins who have never worked with real server grade hardware, who know nothing about planning for redundancy, etc.  Likewise you get electrical engineers who have built theoretical circuits but have never had to produce a working circuit with real world components.

Frankly I'm beginning to wonder if college really gives you anything useful other than a checkbox "yep, got a degree"

Bill

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 10:23 AM, Jay Hannah <jay@jays.net> wrote:

[From http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/boulder-pm/2012-August/001095.html]

On Aug 27, 2012, at 9:50 AM, Walter Pienciak <wpiencia@thunderdome.ieee.org> wrote:
> Academic code seems barebones, with the logic and working of the
> program evident.  Think of the examples in most textbooks.
>
> Production code has acknowledgment of "shit that happens."  Full
> disks, data input outside expected parameters, trying to open
> nonexistent files, etc.  This the realm of Rob's comments, IMO.


-nod-  In my two rounds of being "computer science adjacent" (1993, 2010) I was amazed, both times, at how poorly CS mapped to programming computers for a living. There's a lot of conversational overlap, but academia's refusal to get "bogged down" in any particular toolset leaves students undercooked for being code monkeys.

And 95% of computer science students don't want to be programmers...? Really? What % of CS-targeted jobs will be programming all day?

They're still not teaching version control? (ANY version control system?) Isn't this like an art student having no concept of a paint brush?

As you can tell, I have many energetic beefs with computer related academia.  :)

jhannah
Omaha.pm
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jhannah


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