On Tuesday 05 February 2002 8:08 am, Bruce Miller wrote:
Firstly,I thought it was time that the now misnomer of 'Plans for Linux distro' came to to stop and was re-named.
I don't intend to answer every single point of what Ian says other to say that in general, I agree. I also agree with a lot of what Frank is saying too.
What I don't agree with is this harsh way in we are talking about future members of our society. Frank cited his sitting AEB instead of Oxford maths. If if teachers hadn't been wise to this situation, all those years ago, then Frank could then have been condemded to the 'scrap heap' perhaps?
I don't think that we have been criticising our future members of society. In fact at least once I have stated that the teachers who believe the students *need* instant visual gratification are doing them an injustice and seriously underrating them. On the whole, we have not beet criticising teachers either, but rather the current education system, and the methods used to monitor it, along with the supposed but to a greater or lesser extend irrelevent end-result. There is a growing shortage of *good* programmers and software engineers (is there a difference?) in this country, and the current 'click this then click that' ICT is not going to do anything to aleviate this.
There are a lot of new technologies in the world and lots of new study areas these days as a result.
The computer industry is an area where this statement has always been the case. I have been in the industry for over 13 years, and was at college for 4 years before that. During all that time there has always been some new technology being released. The sound foundations I got in programming has helped me to embrace these new technologies much easier than if I had not had it. There will always be an argument for structured methodical teaching of structured methodical techniques.
We have seemed very polarised in discussions on programming. Should there be RAD or should there not? This seems to the hub of the argument. In my view their should be RAD and the discipline of top down structured programming is too restrictive to creativty and not fast enough for a modern world. We just need RAD that is more robust.
I have nothing against RAD. In fact I have done much work in Delphi, which I believe has been one of the best RAD products generally available. However, Delphi's concepts of Components, data modules etc., only increase the need for top-down self-contained modular designs. Destinct self-contained modules with well defined tasks/functions and API's are what makes most RAD systems work best. There's nothing more rapid than already having half of your project pre-written either by yourself or by other.
There seems to be an obsession with with maths and programming as the only solution to ICT training as well. I have twenty students all wanting to do an A'level in multimedia, web design, Flash, 3d max, cinema and games
I am not obsessed with maths. In fact I'm lousy at maths, only surpassed by my absolute dire attempts and English. However, both disciplins require methodology and structure of thought and generally go well togther.
design. The head is on my back to come up with the goods. Universities are
But what are the goods? Good league table results, or students with enough foundation to be able to actually hack it at Uni?
now offering courses in this but I can't find an A'level syllabus because of this obsession. Maths and programming has it's place but computing is about more than just this, these days.
Writing HTML is programming. Writing Flash is programming. Writing games is one of the hardest areas there is in programming. Poor web sites are perfect examples of poor/sloppy programming style, ending up with sites that are hard to navigate, unpleasent/diffecult to read, fail if not using one specific browser (and even specific versions of that browser). Good web sites, combine well structured modular HTML, often generated statically or dynamically by well written programs/cgi's. PHP is a wonderfull language, that can drown programmers quickly if they don't put some structure/forethought into their site.
About time the GNU site had a graphical revamp too. (IMHO)
Why? Is it too quick and responsive for you? Is it too easy to navigate? Is the information not obscured enough with gaudy colours? Is it too good at delivering the information it holds? I'm not getting at your opinions here, but I'm emphasising the difference in viewpoints between people like Frank and myself who want to see good quality, efficient code that does it's job best and the growing eye-candy brigade which is causing part of the errosion in today's ICT (and other) training.
Bruce Miller.
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