Programmer Education, part 2

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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Becoming a Programmer, part 1

A few weeks ago, I ran across a post at Coding Horror where Jeff goes into what he thinks is a better way to teach Computer Science to undergrads. He describes how everything should be done according to best practices – all code in source control, everything needs an installer, every program will have bug reports – and the developer has to fix the bugs. He even states that it would be excruciating.

I think that would be like training an airline pilot to fly by making them take the stick of an F-22 in the middle of a dogfight. There is a certain level of proficiency that is needed before you can progress, and if a student hasn't reached this level, all the trial by fire will do is char them. You need to get them to the point where they are not concerned about how to write code before you make them work in the framework that code exists in. A personal anecdote – I had to learn how to develop code in C under UNIX at the start of my first compiler course; but I already knew how to program in other languages, so C was just new syntax, and UNIX was not too much of a hurdle.

Now, once a student has taken a couple of programming courses, a series of courses that do enforce real-world constraints would be very desirable. All courses after the introductory set could require source control, and some could deal with portions of the real-world, like versioning – start with a simple 2-week project, and once that's done, start adding new features, and some back-porting. Another could deal with code repair – everyone gets a copy of a program that has bugs, and they need to fix them.

Another issue I have with Jeff's post is that it assumes all software is PC-based, web-centric, standalone applications. Developers working on a single server in a large application suite that runs under UNIX, for example, might not need to worry about deployment, because that is a solved issue for that system – their new version of the server will be packaged by the existing tools, and the upgrade issues are part of the DBA's work.

So while there is plenty of room for improvement in the education of a software developer, it shouldn't be like dropping someone onto a speeding motorcycle; it should be like learning to ride a bike - you spend some time with training wheels first.

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