<p>So… you expect to learn only the ‘new’ stuff without any understanding on how those ‘new’ stuff came to be? or, what was the problem with the ‘old’ stuff and how the ‘new’ stuff addressed those problems?</p>
<p>CS history teaches you CS just about as well as US History teaches you how to be the president. It doesn’t hurt, but if you don’t know how to actually use the information, it’s absolutely useless.</p>
<p>i) I will remember “BA in Unemployable Studies” and use it all the time now.
ii) Does your wife program in Ada?
iii) I’m sure MS CS programs at accredited universities have matured a lot since then, the things you’re describing make no sense to me and certainly don’t mesh with what I know about my own college’s grad-level CS classes.</p>
<p>It used to be that any hardware or software that failed in the marketplace was explained away by its supporters as, “Being ahead of its time.” </p>
<p>I remember graduate CS programs from the 80s similar to those Turbo was referring to. They were basically the same classes a CS undergrad would take, starting with Introduction to Programming, minus all the general education stuff. I only knew a few people coming out of those programs, but they seemed perfectly qualified. Or at least as qualified as someone who just got their Bachelors in CS.</p>
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<p>Not true. Most of the cutting-edge work in CS is being done in private companies by people without Ph.D.s.</p>
<p>Tom, hard as it may seem to believe, the pharma manufacturing system my wife worked on for 3-4 years was all Python. You basically have a bunch of individual machines each doing one very specific task, all talking to the control computer who tells everyone what to do and collects status from everyone. All done via TCP/IP messages back and forth. To say that I was blown away by how clever it was would be an understatement. The control cluster was IIRC a few blade servers running Linux, talking to the machinery on one side and recording/tracking process on the other. I have seen the thing in action on open house days and it is truly mind boggling. Granted, it took a few years to do but if this is what people think of as “IT” I have news for them…</p>
<p>I realize CS has changed in the 3 decades I’ve been away from school, but the general ways things are taught are the same. Undergrad CS is all about useful skills and background, with a sprinkling of theory, and grad school is less useful skills and more in depth look into why things are the way they are, and where we are going.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses. For the people taking about easy cs programs my friend’s going to do biomedical engineering at Georgia tech and hopefully that’s where I’ll be doing cs after my senior year next year. It’s not Stanford but it’s not a cake walk either. The thing about cs not being math is pretty stupid because computer science is basically about computation. Also I don’t actually take their advice on this matter seriously but I was wondering if other kinds of engineers thought software engineering was a joke. Thankfully that’s not the case with most of you. Also people saying that a bad programmer can’t kill someone like a bad engineer can is just unfair. Programs
Software engineers make programs that control things that can kill people. I’m not exactly sure of an example since I have no experience in the field yet but I remember someone saying something similar.</p>
<p>The overall theme of this particular topic is that ALL of the engineering areas are difficult and to compare them is really futile. It’s just that every other week someone wants to stir up the age-old “My engineering area is harder than yours” topic or the “prestige of the school” topic.</p>
<p>I have designed and worked on such systems for years. The software architecture actually is pretty simple once you understand it. Assume all hosts are HTTP servers which take care of network protocol. It allows you to use Python, PHP, Java, … or all of them at the same tim. The fundamental knowledge about how to get different parts to work together I learn from a text book that is commonly used in freshman year. The only difference is different parts of my programs can run on the same or different hosts. All individual components, which are the hard part in my opinion, are done by engineers with specialized domain knowledge, almost most of them PhDs without CS degree.</p>
<p>The DEC Alpha <em>was</em> ahead of its time, at least in terms of floating-point arithmetic. They blew everything else out of the water on that. I remember when, just before it went under, computer graphics people were all excited about cheap Alpha render farms. They were freakishly cheap too, maybe that’s why it failed on a business level. I remember seeing top-notch Alpha workstations with Windows NT advertised for $500 in 1996-97.</p>
[Blohm</a> & Voss BV 141 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blohm_%26_Voss_BV_141]Blohm”>Blohm & Voss BV 141 - Wikipedia)</p>