Re: Are 'best' universities being targeted

[mdisea!mothost!schbbs!news@uunet.uu.net (David Tannen)]

IMHO (honest, I haven't been humble for a long time):

My best professors in college were the ones who had a decade or two
working on big systems.  The best professor spent the entire semester
telling us about the systems that had failed and how they had failed.
Quite a few of the students (and profs) were very uncomfortable w/
this approach.  Many wondered if she had ever worked on a successful
project.  I came to realize that she was teaching us a truism about
software - All systems fail.  Good systems can recover from failure.

Some of the worst professors I had never worked outside of the 
university environment.  If I followed their ideas out here where I
have worked the last 9yrs, I might have been fired.

I would like to see the a CS program require the following areas:
	Calc I & II (maybe III) 
	A minor in Science or Business
	Data Structures
	OS Theory
	2 Intro EE classes taught by & out of the EE dept. where
		you build some circuits in the labs. (I found them 
		very useful)
	3 Digital Design classes where you have to build some 
		fairly complex digital circuits.
	Systems programming (Lots of Assembler/C)
	Language comparison class
	Systems Analysis & Design 
		(SA/SD and OOA/OOD, plus all projects should be team
		 projects)
	Algorithms
	Real-Time

What would I eliminate from undergrad studies:
	AI
	Language classes for credit (maybe 1 credit)
		The dept. would need to pick a standard language
		for all core classes.  Ada teaches discipline,
		and core software engineering ideas.

Just my $0.02.  Any others that should be +/- from my lists?

---
David Tannen
tannend@source.asset.com
tannen@tigger.geg.mot.com
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-- "Dependance on wizardry to mitigate the fundamental limitations
--  of software is called 'hacking'."  Grady Booch.
--
-- Developing MS-Windows applications often requires 'wizardry'.
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