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From: Rich <rich@example.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 03:29:29 -0000 (UTC)
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Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
> Rich <rich@example.invalid> writes:
> 
>> Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
>>> Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school 
>>>>programs with some computing added.  I think those are pretty much 
>>>>worthless, but they get a lot of students.
>>> 
>>> Oh, and I will say that most of the students that I deal with 
>>> personally are not CS students at all but engineering students.  They 
>>> get one programming class, usually in Matlab, and no basic computer 
>>> literacy stuff at all.
>>
>> Just one programming class..... in Matlab???  For Engineering.  Ugh.
>>
>> I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class, 
>> and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside) 
>> class, all required classes for Engineering.  Pascal class was trivial 
>> (had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so 
>> just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we 
>> were using.  Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate 
>> Fortran in the end.  Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already 
>> understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects.  The assembler 
>> class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this 
>> point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an 
>> 'assembler' of sorts).  Just had to "learn the language" rather than 
>> the "how to program" part.
>>
>> But, /just/ matlab.  That is so wrong on so many levels.
> 
> I know of a leading university that gives all engineering students (all
> of them), two courses on Python.  The first course is just so students
> get a minimum of the Python syntax---of course, the course design calls
> it ``how to program''.  The second half of the year is to learn the very
> basics of the so-called OOP and then some packages such as numpy, scipy
> and matplotlib are *introduced*.

Sigh, no wonder the 'newer grads' all seem to either be unable to 
program, or can /only/ program by barely stringin existing libraries 
together.  If there isn't a library to do "x", don't bother asking them 
to write a program to do "x" (no matter how simple "x" might actually 
be).

> And what do we see in these courses?  Nearly all engineering students
> consider them accessory to their degrees and so they try to ignore these
> courses to the maximum because they need to work on calculus and physics.
> 
> And I can't blame them: these courses are totally uninteresting.  I
> would have done the same.

I treated the programming classes as my variant of the "basket weaving" 
class.  The easy A where one got to relax vs. the other engineering 
classes.