yes, people who use calculus in PERL scripts are the
same people who would document their code in Latin.
Congratulations, you've completely missed the point. We
should teach CS majors calculus not so they can write
numeric-integration code (which they'd be better off
getting from Numerical Recipes instead), but so they
learn how to analyze and solve problems in the context of
formal rule sets. Programming fits that description.
I've taught undergraduate programming labs for the past
three years: very concrete, applied stuff (the course is an
introduction to software engineering; we teach them how to
write programs, not how to write code that compiles). The
classes are very eclectic: many CS majors (some interested
in theory, some in practice), many engineers, and a strong
minority of other Science, Arts and Business majors. The
students who've taken courses involving more abstract formal
reasoning (Math, Philosophy, Physics, etc) are consistently
better able to understand the concepts and do much better on
the coursework than the ones who focus on nuts and bolts.
The best student I've had in that course was an English
major with a minor in Philosophy.
people with CIS degrees are the people working on help
desks and doing data entry.
Then what are they doing at a university?
for a BA in CS why not skip the higher math and try to
teach them how to debug and optimise code.
You can't teach someone how to debug or optimize code.
(Glub knows I've tried.) The best you can do is teach them
how to think logically and abstractly about the code, which
involves teaching them how to think logically and
abstractly.
Math tends to be better at that than software
engineering.
(CS theory/algorithmics is also good, but that's just
another math course, really.)
so that everything that they write for the first couple
of years after getting their degree doesn't have to be re-
written by someone with more experience.
The problem, in my experience teaching students and in
the private sector, isn't that people know calculus, but
not how to code: it's that they can't think abstractly about
the code. They can catch syntax errors, but can't solve
logic errors to save their lives (or jobs). With a very
few exceptions, the people whose code has to be rewritten
are the same ones whose reply to required math courses was
"when am I ever going to have to use this?"
--
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
:wq
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