Having been out of the academic world for decades now, I'm not up to speed on the teaching in CS/Programming curriculum these days, but various laments from people hiring lead me to believe that many CS grads are being taught to the industry popular things - Java, Microsoft Visual Studio, etc. - and given at most a cursory glance at CS theory. My own coursework was luckily free of commercial value - I was taught in Pascal.
But this post rang true - students are rarely given much chance to develop data structures, or to see why certain structures are better than others. The closest example I ca recall from my classes was an AI course where we were implementing a game-playing program in Lisp, and the alpha-beta tree I was using to find good moves could make about 3 moves before I ran out of time on the machine. I don't know if any of the colleges these days even have limited time on computers any more - other than the sheer clock time limit between the assignment and the deadline.
Given the large number of specialized data structures that exist, it would be hard to do them all justice, but a course that forced the processing of really big data sets would help - driving home the differences between O(n) and O(log n), for example.
Perhaps the availability of truly large data sets - SETI@home, the Folding project, and others, CS can get more meaningful exercises to show the students the real impacts of careless choices.
Technorati Tags --
Software, SoftwareDevelopment, Computers, Programming
HTTP
No comments:
Post a Comment