[LINK] Let's pause before drinking the 'coding in schools' Kool-Aid

[David Lochrin]

On 2015-06-03 23:12 Bernard Robertson wrote:

> Education in the STEM fundamentals last a lifetime, and I speak from experience. My first, second and third degrees, finished in the early 1970s, are still totally relevant today. The knowledge and expertise I acquired on such things as the 8088, 8086, 80286, 80386 etc microprocessors, IBM and Univac mainframes as well as associated technologies like BAL, Exec8, Wordperfect, TurboPascal, DBase IV etc are useless and irrelevant in today's technology environments.

I thoroughly agree.  Although I'm now retired, I used to find that technical staff in industry too often thought at a procedural level.  They knew the process for dealing with particular situations but not the underlying theory or architecture, and consequently they sometimes failed to recognise the same problem with a different presentation next time it arose.

Later in a university Department of Software Engineering we took great pains to have students always justify WHY design decisions were made, and to think in a disciplined way about how their projects dealt with the larger business requirements.  I think that sort of education will stand them in good stead in any field.

But I just felt embarrassed listening to poor Bill going on about "coding"...  I'm sure any decent interviewer would soon reveal he knew as much about "coding" as Brandis does (or did) about "metadata". 

David L.