[ILUG] Computer science education

[Dermot Daly]

My view on all this is that every computer science (or computer
applications as its called in DCU) course should teach assembler and C.

These languages give you a good grounding in bits n bytes, and teach
stuff like memory is a valuable resource; The lack of bounds checking,
etc. teaches good discipline.

Java is a great language, but allows you to be lazy with things like
memory - You know that the garbage collector will sort this out on your
behalf - This is great because it allows you to concentrate on writing
your business logic without having to dwell on the computer science
aspect, but can prove to be wasteful of resources.

Ironically, I also think that as part of the C course, students should
be recommended "Writing Solid Code" by Steve Maguire. (Why Ironically I
hear you ask - It's a Microsoft Press book, but the best book on coding
I've ever come across).

Cheers,
Dermot.

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Nichols [mailto:programmer1 at eircom.net] 
Sent: 06 February 2004 15:17
To: ilug at linux.ie
Subject: Re: [ILUG] Computer science education


On Fri, 2004-02-06 at 00:31, Niall O Broin wrote:
> I was shocked at the idea of CS students NOT learning assembly 
> language.
> 
> Don't they do that any more ? Does a computer science course now 
> consist
> solely of Microsoft training modules ?

I'm in year 2 of a computer science course at the University of Ulster.
Our modules look like this:
http://www.infm.ulst.ac.uk/~bsc/courses/E411UM.htm 
We didn't have a module on assembly language, but it was taught over the
course of maybe 2 weeks in a Computer Hardware & Organisation class. We
used a 6502 emulator in practicals for about 3 weeks. I would have liked
to have had a whole module on it, but we're not even having one class on
C. -Eric 

-- 
Irish Linux Users' Group http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug/