Picking up from the last post, Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror referenced a Joel Spolsky post about the ideal programmer education where Joel was suggesting a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Programming.
I had a WTF moment on that.
He advocates a 1/3 liberal arts, 2/3s software development curriculum. Perhaps it's just my engineering education, but I found that many of the engineering students I learned with were quite well rounded, while the LA students tended to be missing the hard science side of things – so I'd naturally suggest an emphasis on the engineering side would be better, since we engineering geeks often have enough side interests to round us out.
But more to the point, I can't see how anyone in the business can think that programming is a Fine Art. At best it might be a Practical Art – Fine Arts are things like dance, music, painting. A friend of mine is an artist, but since he was planning to work in advertising, his degree was not a Fine Arts degree. And moreso, given the amount of math that we do make use of in CS/programming, I'd submit that it's at least a craft, and closer to a young engineering discipline. It's still young enough that the edges are fuzzy, and we need a good deal of creativity to solve the issues we face.
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