[SystemSafety] A Fire Code for Software?

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2018-03-09 19:47 , Steve Tockey wrote:
> 
> PBL wrote:
> 
> ³We will never deserve or gain the recognition we seek until we too
> specialise appropriately.²

No, I didn't write that.

> ³ I had thought all that was basic. Indeed, I have thought for nearly four
> decades now that the list
> in "all the stuff involved in programming digital computers" above was
> core. Apparently various
> curriculum committees don't necessarily agree.²
> 
> Just curious, but what curriculum committees are you referring to? 

Steve, every university computer science/informatics department, indeed every university department,
has a curriculum committee, and it changes membership every few years. So in my experience about a
dozen. Is it important to list them?

> To get an engineering degree from an ABET (www.abet.org) accredited
> university in the US, one has to take classes in <everything>. ...
> Those courses force the student to think in very different
> ways, both of which are important for all engineers. It¹s learning the
> thought processes that¹s most important.

Yes, there are all kinds of theories about what is important and what is not. Everyone agrees it is
important to learn everything, and to think in all possible different kinds of ways. The art of
curriculum design is to choose three years worth of training for people who aren't necessarily
talented enough to learn to think in all possible different kinds of ways in their three years in
university (few people are).

One test of a well-designed curriculum lies in how the students respond to questions when they are
examined. That can be, and mostly is, very different to what the curriculum says on the page.
Indeed, there is often a large gap. The curriculum says "basic propositional logic". The one set of
students (in University A) can work complex Boolean formulas to determine their satisfiability; the
other set (in University B) can't even explain what "A OR B AND C" might possibly mean. I've
experienced both.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
MoreInCommon
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de





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