27 May
2016
27 May
'16
7:33 p.m.
On May 27, 2016, at 3:25 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at
xenosoft.com> wrote:
...
Anyway, back to, . . .
Clancy and Harvey reworked the UC undergraduate lower division (first two years)
curriculum. They setup a three course sequence at the core, consisting of
"Abstraction", "Data Structures", and "Demystification".
They called a meeting of local CS departments to tell us what we should switch over to
teaching.
Those first two titles sound reasonable. The third sounds strangely touchy-feely rather
than like an engineering course.
...
They declared, "Nobody programs in Assembly language any more, nor ever will
again."
...
They had a brilliant visionary concept of CS education.
I would not put it that way. "Brilliant" is a term of praise, as is
"visionary".
Someone who claims that "nobody programs in assembly language any more nor will ever
again" does not merit those adjectives. The correct adjectives would be
"ignorant" and "myopic". Those are the correct terms because their
assertion is valid only if you limit yourself to a limited class of programmers, and
ignore compiler writers, diagnostics programmers, BIOS engineers, bootloader programmers,
or embedded systems developers, just to name a few.
I'm surprised that such people would be working at a supposedly highly regarded outfit
like Berkeley.
paul