Computer Science

[jwantz at hpcc2.hpcc.noaa.gov]

Hi Amanda,
You think you are screwed up there our situation in NWS is even worse.  
We have half of our meteorologists around here trying to program in 
FORTRAN (the only language they know) and the other half try to program 
in C, C++ or esql/c that they don't know and have to learn on the job.  
Then our computer specialists and computer science students are often 
expected to program in FORTRAN which they don't know.  Then we have a 
computer programmer who is a contractor who loves to use numerous goto 
statements in C.  When we used to have code reviews nobody but Joe Lang 
(a blind programmer) and me used to complain about this practice.  
Grrrr!

     Jim
On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, Amanda Lee wrote:

> Nope, Unix, Mainframes aren't standard anymore.  The college grads we get
> these days at Verizon have no clue what Unix or Mainframes are all about.
> Everything is taught on a Windows-based Platform.  I believe JAVA is
> taught, probably Visual Basic, Maybe sometimes C Language but usually C
> Plus Plus which was actually abandoned in the project I work on for
> straight C Language.
> 
> I would think in the future though, there will be a change back to at
> least teaching Linux since it can run on a less expensive platform.  It's
> pretty disgraceful how the content of Computer Sciences education has been
> degraded and these kids coming out have an ego bigger than life and think
> they can take on the World in a day!
> 
> They really struggle when they can't understand how to program and the
> quality of code coming out is pretty awful.  There is even this mentality
> in the Corporate World which indicates that one can learn everything they
> need to on the job and yet they can't figure out why  there are so many
> problems with efficiency and the costs resulting from poor efficiency.
> 
> Amanda Lee
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, 14 Mar 2002 jwantz at hpcc2.hpcc.noaa.gov wrote:
> 
> > Hi Chris,
> > I'm not going to get involved in the "bookshare wars', but since you were
> > chastizing others on this list because most people use WINDOWS and not
> > linux, I think its only fair to point out that your computer science
> > department is very nonstandard.  Though I am a meteorologist, not a
> > computer science person, I know many computer science students in the past
> > and the present.  Teaching WINDOWS programming is very nonstandard.  I
> > would guess that at least 90 percent of the schools teach programming on a
> > UNIX variant of some kind.  In the past thre was a fair amount of people
> > using VMS.  However, a lot of beginning C and C++ classes did use
> > Turbo/Borland.  WINDOWS programming is much more difficult than UNIX
> > programming, so I suppose you are to be congratulated for making it
> > through such a tough curriculum.
> >
> >      Jim Wantz
> >
> >
> >
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> 
> 
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