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Two gems from Queue

2 July 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 6 Comments

I was reading this month’s edition of ACM Queue magazine and I came across (until now) two gems.

The first one is at the end of an interview of Michael Stonebraker, creator of Ingres (ancestor of PostgreSQL) and now adjunct professor of computer science at MIT. He is being interviewed by Margo Seltzer, one of the founders of Sleepycat Software (now owned by Oracle), makers of Berkeley DB. She is now professor in computer science at Harvard.

Here is the gem:

STONEBRAKER […] I think MIT has some of the smartest people on the planet. So does Stanford. So does Berkeley.

SELTZER There’s another school up the river, Mike, that you’re missing.

STONEBRAKER I applaud your efforts to improve computer science at Harvard, and I wish Harvard would get deadly serious about computer science because there’s a tremendous upside that you can realize over time.

SELTZER Well, come meet our students!

Those two are (amicably) arguing about whether MIT is better than Harvard and Margo Seltzer says “Well, come meet our students!”. I find this beautiful… and enlightening. This is THE metric to use to judge a university: are the students good or not!?!

I dream of a University of Mauritius capable of producing young Torvalds, Jobs or Gates every year.

Programming in the 2000’s

The second gem is in an article written by Michi Henning, chief scientist at ZeroC, makers of Ice. He writes about APIs and how they should be designed. At one point, he goes lyrical about how programming should be taught in universities:

Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when I was cutting my teeth as a programmer and getting my degree, much of the emphasis in a budding programmer’s education was on data structures and algorithms. They were the bread and butter of programming, and a good understanding of data structures such as lists, balanced trees, and hash tables was essential, as was a good understanding of common algorithms and their performance tradeoffs. These were also the days when system libraries provided only the most basic functions, such as simple I/O and string manipulation; higher-level functions such as bsearch() and qsort() were the exception rather than the rule. This meant that it was de rigueur for a competent programmer to know how to write various data structures and manipulate them efficiently

We have moved on considerably since then. Virtually every major development platform today comes with libraries full of pre-canned data structures and algorithms. In fact, these days if I catch a programmer writing a linked list, that person had better have a very good reason for doing so instead of using an implementation provided by a system library.

Similarly, in the ’70s and ’80s, if I wanted to create software, I had to write pretty much everything from scratch: if I needed encryption, I wrote it from scratch; if I needed compression, I wrote it from scratch; if I needed inter-process communication, I wrote it from scratch. All this has changed dramatically with the open source movement. Today, open source is available for almost every imaginable kind of reusable functionality. As a result, the process of creating software has changed considerably: instead of creating functionality, much of today’s software engineering is about integrating existing functionality or about repackaging it in some way. […]

Little seems to have changed since then: my son, who is currently working toward a software engineering degree at the same university where I earned my degree, tells me that still no one bothers to explain these things. (Bold text mine)

Beautiful. Instead of focussing on implementing a linked list, it is better to teach young programmers (i.e. first year students) how to use one from the standard library of any modern programming language.

It’s important for young programmers to understand the characteristics of linked lists, things like the complexity of common operations, and what is feasible with them and not. Then, in a second course, the CS students (and not the IT students) could learn about implementing such data structures.

It’s difficult to resist something as obvious as this.

Filed Under: Education, Programming, Technology

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. selven says

    2 July 2007 at 22:14

    In fact, these days if I catch a programmer writing a linked list, that person had better have a very good reason for doing so instead of using an implementation provided by a system library.
    why people would always tend to use linked list (or any low level implementation of something that may have already been there for him to use (from my point of view):

    1.Poor documentation of what actually x, y or z does. (specially explaining what each parameter is supposed to do)

    2. Certain implementation doesn’t really have a logical name (e.g setsockopt(,,), how will someone have guessed if they were looking to enable debug tracing that they should have googled setsockopt??, its only after long searches (or asking) that they will know they have to look for get/setsockopt)

    3. Certain api look really weird… you don’t have any idea what they do, (if only they did only what they are meant to do, but instead, certain interface do multiple things that get someone (half brained as me) to get soo caught up and confused that i prefer to .. take some patience and do it right from the smallest unit of programming.)

    That said, :p when interfaces are available and are easy enough to understand, its just a BIG relieve (ahh more free time)

    (if someone did a graphical documentation of most api around :p god bless em , will ease up my life a lot:p)

    I dream of a University of Mauritius capable of producing young Torvalds, Jobs or Gates every year.
    That would be cool, but then.. geeks are practically killed on sight in Mauritius :p (bribes & corruption), and no fun.

    no gates/jobs/torv probably coz.. there’s no incentive in doing anything about computing here in mtius.

    +$3|

  2. Eddy Young says

    3 July 2007 at 19:15

    IMO…

    1. A poorly-documented API is not worth using.

    2. That’s where the importance of R&D lies in software development. Programmers don’t just code; they also need to know how to find answers.

    3. Goto 1.

  3. Anascrash says

    4 July 2007 at 17:39

    well i get 98% of what i’m paying for with myt ^^ well betweenn 00:00 am till 6pm

    ^^ am happy with it
    32-34kbps for what am paying for

  4. Anascrash says

    4 July 2007 at 17:40

    well the rest of the time (peak hours) , i still get nice speed 25-32kpbs for download but the browsing speed is *&^*&^ (lol) ! even if am not dwnlding anything !

  5. Ashesh says

    13 December 2008 at 14:43

    I dream of a University of Mauritius capable of producing young Torvalds, Jobs or Gates every year.

    Now that you are no longer active in Academic Institutions, What is your comment on this statement? Do you think that UoM will do so one day?

    anything to inspire us, UoM students?

  6. avinash says

    14 December 2008 at 08:29

    The important thing to understand is that, every year, young Torvalds, Jobs or Gates are born in Mauritius.

    Unfortunately, we have a 16 year (6 + 7 + 3) education system which does it best to transform these young Torvalds, Jobs or Gates into “average” Mauritians by not cultivating their unique talents.

    Fortunately, our education system sometimes fails.

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