I was in Advanced Analysis and Calculus my Senior year in high school, and we used a Calculus book that they used at Phx College. It was a very rigorous math program, as we proved everything starting at the Limit Theorem. We only covered material in one semester that got thru derivatives. At PC, they got thru the beginning of integrals in one Semester.
My freshman year at ASU, I couldn’t quiz out of Calculus b/c the HS version didn’t cover the whole gamut. (The juniors got 3 semesters and could have had Calculus 101 and 102 waived since the HS class was part of the AP program.)
Anyway, I had to repeat Calculus 101 my first semester at ASU and got A’s on the review material and did really poorly on the Integrals — because at ASU they took a very different approach that I found very confusing (they didn’t go thru proofs of anything.) Remember, we got the same stuff that was taught at PC! So I think I got a C in Calc 101. And I ended up having to repeat Calc 2 five times! Ugh. (I was a Math major, and it was a required course.)
In fact, I heard from a number of people that many of the classes at PC were way more rigorous than at ASU. I probably should have gone to PC my first two years.
ASU at the time had five (5) different ways to study computers, and none of them were “Computer Science”, which didn’t come along until 2 years after I graduated.
I wouldn’t say these five different degrees varied with how “technical” they were — their focus was just different.
One was in the School of Technology, and focused on more practical stuff, very IT-ish in many ways. One was the CIS program in the Business School that was mostly focused on COBOL and financial things. One was in Electrical Engineering and focused more on hardware design. One was in Industrial Engineering and was more like what we’d think of as IT today. And the last was in Liberal Arts / Math where they had three options: Pure Math, Applied Math, and Computer Math. I chose the latter one.
(This was in the 70’s, as microprocessors were just beginning to show up in the world.)
When they created their CS degree, they combined the two programs in Engineering with Computer Math and moved them into a whole new “College”, added a couple of missing courses, and that became their Computer Science program. I think you could still chose to focus on something that was more hardware or software facing.
IT didn’t become its own thing for another decade or so as a way of managing hoardes of PCs in the workplace as opposed to just a big honking computer in a “fish bowl” and scads of terminals connected to it via RS-232 lines and dial-up mux panels.
But when I look back, I’d say most of the CS courses were designed to teach students how to effectively deal with the limitations of then-current technology — limited memory, limited backing storage (things like HDDs that IBM called DASDs as well as tape drives), and very slow (mostly dial-up) communication channels. So a lot of it was theoretical in the sense of how to write software that would work reasonably well within these limitations.
There were some faster interconnect methods that used coax to connect computers that came along in the 80’s, but Ethernet didn’t become more ubiquitious until the mid-90’s, although dial-up connections were still the rule for remote connections.
I guess they still teach a lot of this theory today, but because it’s useful to know, not because of any particular hardware limitations. I mean, the average cell phone today is FAR faster and more capable than even a CRAY-1 in 1980, which was pretty much the fastest and most expensive computer at the time.
If you’re involved with IT today, or even financial computing for businesses, you don’t need to know any of this stuff. It’s just not relevant.
Which is why I get a little annoyed whenever I tell people I’m a “software developer” and their response is, “Oh, you’re an IT guy.” Uh, no. I write the software that runs the equipment that “IT guys” use to do their jobs, and some of it has not changed much since 1980! I tell folks that I couldn’t get a job in IT if my life depended on it. When the IT guys can’t solve a problem, they call me. That said, they really don’t want people like me around. And I’d be bored out of my mind. They’re two totally different worlds, and both very necessary.
I wouldn’t say one is “more technical” than the other. I’m not even sure how to characterize the differences. Consider a pro sport like football — there are people who play in the games, and people who take care of the facilities they play in. They’re both necessary to make things work, but football players don’t give a crap about concession stands and bathrooms, and the people who do have no clue how to mount an offense or defense on the field during a game.
Programmers have built these amazing GUI-based tools and systems that specialists in various application domains use. But they’ve done virtually nothing to improve their own work. We use the same tools and processes that have been employed since the 60’s. Everything just runs faster, so we can get more done in less time. But the abstraction levels in our own field have not improved nearly as fast as in the applilcation domains we help improve.
If you look at fields like construction and semiconductor design, there’s no way we could build fabs or skyscrapers or even computer chips without the amazing innovations programmers have created for those application domains. But what have we done for ourselves? We still use imperative languages to write code line-by-line, they are subject to the same types of errors, debugging works the same way (well, we didn’t have debuggers until the late 80’s), automated testing is almost non-existent.
It’s just insane to me how LITTLE we’ve done to improve the ability to do this thing we call “programming”. Maybe it’s just … job security? :o
-David Schwartz
> On Dec 24, 2022, at 7:28 AM, techlists@phpcoderusa.com wrote:
>
> You make a lot of good points David.
>
> Can we agree there are three types of degrees?
>
> 1) Non technical such as English.
> 2) Somewhat Technical such as MIS.
> 3) Engineering/Computer Science/Math or highly technical degrees.
>
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