Sunday, February 11, 2007

premature announcement of the death of computer science

some recent letters/articles
viz
death of cs
claim that there is no demand for CS undergraduate university degree programmes of the "classic" kind (ones that teach, say, the ACM CS curriculum material), and that there's no demand for CS graduates (or PhDs) in industry, and that this is because the subject is dead.

what a load of piffle. the subject is more alive than ever and lots of action is out there, and demand for graduates and PhDs who can reason compulationally, AND programme, is higher than EVER. however, schools programmes have completely failed to deliver anythign interesting, so no kids are coming out of british 6th forms with any idea from their teachers of what is cool in CS. the ones that do had to do it on their own (and are often very good as a result) but those that have innate abilities may never discover this and miss out on great careers.

Training people for IT "careers" is, in contrast, consigning them to the dustbin of history, since that is EXACTLY what everone is outsourcing to the countries where labour is cheaper, or to school leavers who discover that at least maintaining a bunch of PCs and printers is better than working in McDonalds....

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