Anton Aylward wrote:

Dirk Gently said the following on 05/14/2012 04:44 AM:

...

This was at Purdue -- the FIRST Computer Science department in the world.

Check out Manchester.

But sometimes being first isn't an advantage; sometimes coming later means you can learn from the mistakes of the pioneers :-)

The way I see it is, the first CS department in the world should have the advantage of being able to identify mistake notions first, and therefore having the most time to correct them. However, that didn't seem to actually be happening, because the EE School at Purdue did a far better job at teaching programing than the CS School. For example, EE did a far better job teaching the student to analyze a problem first and decide what's the best strategy for solving a problem, as opposed to "I'm just gonna sit down and write using my favorite algorithms and try to avoid the algorithms I don't like" which was what seemed to result from "present the algorithm before presenting a problem" style of teaching. EE also did a far better job of teaching the ideas of verifying both input and output for validity than the CS school did. Admittedly, this is only one campus, but Purdue is a pretty influential University when it comes to computing. The number of CS and computer-oriented EE grads each year amounts to about 10x as many as most other schools in the 35,000 student range that also offer such programs. Each School of Engineering at Purdue (Electrical, Mechanical, Nuke, Aero &Astro, Chemical, Industrial, Materials, etc.) rivals the size of the aggregate total of ALL engineering assets at many similarly sized universities. And in the US, there are very few universities larger than 40,000 students at all, let alone those that have EE and/or CS schools of any influence. [Texas A&M is far bigger, but not notable in either field]. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org