blog: Overlooked Essentials for Optimizing Code

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 21/10/2010 09:02, Peter Alexander wrote:
> On 20/10/10 2:59 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> I don't mean to offend anyone, but if you CS degree (at least for the
>> last decade or so), doesn't teach about points 1 and 2 above as part of
>> core curricula, then it's a pretty crappy CS degree. The same is
>> probably also true for other related degrees (*-engineering, maths), at
>> least with regards to point 1.
>
> I don't really think of CS that way. To me, CS is to practical
> programming as pure math is to accounting, i.e. I don't think CS should
> be teaching about profiling because that's what software engineering is
> for. They are two different worlds in my opinion. If you wanted to get a
> practical programming education and you took CS then I think you took
> the wrong degree.

Well, you think wrongly. :)
If you look at the top universities worldwide, the majority of them have 
only one "computer programming" undergraduate degree. Sometimes it is 
called "Computer Science" (typical in the US), other times it is called 
"Computer Engineering", "Informatics Engineering", "Software 
Engineering", "Informatics Science" or something like that (typical in 
Europe), but despite the different names they are essentially the same: 
courses designed to _teach and educate future software engineers_. A 
good software engineer will need a lot of the basis of CS and maths. 
Also those courses are nonetheless perfectly fine for someone who wishes 
to study CS on an academical level (ie, research). It does not make 
sense to have a separate undergraduate degree (other than the CS degree 
or the Math degree), and in some cases it also does not make sense to 
have a separate graduate degree (MSc.).


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer