Love this part " I never felt the need for an accounting course - the accountants always let me know what they need. "
Regards,
Bill Hopkins
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Buck Calabro
Sent: Friday, June 14, 2013 1:34 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Future Programmers - The future of IBM i
On 6/14/2013 11:07 AM, Paul Nelson wrote:
I might suggest that when you reach out to students, you go after some that
have been business majors. I've always maintained that it's easier to teach
a business major to program business applications than it is to teach
somebody with a computer science degree.
There's a big difference between creating balance sheets and income
statements and writing compilers.
:-))
I don't have any degrees, but I am the last generation where this is a
viable career choice. I've never met a single CS grad who couldn't
write the code to create a balance sheet but the world's a big place and
I haven't met everybody yet.
Without any degrees I can't personally compare the usefulness of CS vs
MBA degrees, but I don't have any accounting books on my shelf. I do
have a dog-eared copy of Knuth's The Art Of Computer Programming along
with McConnell's Code Complete, Cockburn's Agile Software Development,
Feathers' Working Effectively With Legacy Code and Tuohy's
Re-Engineering RPG Legacy Applications. After a Guinness I might admit
to having Lewis, Rosencrantz and Stearn's Compiler Design Theory up
there too.
I never felt the need for an accounting course - the accountants always
let me know what they need. I've always wanted to take some CS courses
though. Discrete Structures, Discrete Mathematics, Algorithms and Data
Structures, Bayesian Data Analysis - that sort of thing. Something
that'll let me understand how to structure my database and query so that
if a customer orders a big trailer, my system can suggest a 2 inch receiver.
It may well be true that CS graduates aren't taught to write code. But
I'd be very surprised if they can't (on the whole) be taught to write
code better than I was. Rather than a CS course, what we need is a more
targeted curriculum, something that emphasizes how the pieces fit
together. Why CL is important, how subfiles' external DDS and the
corresponding RPG code interlock, and how to incrementally improve an
existing application system without disrupting the users. The
interlocking concept really comes into play when we talk about wrapping
Java or Python or extending out to the web.
--buck
midrange.com
