[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
Dave Berkeley wrote: > I'd be interested to know what people study at University these days. > I've always preferred working with Physics or Electronics people, as > Comp Sci seems to put funny ideas into people's heads in this > country. I've worked with a few great Comp Scis from the US, but the > best people I've worked with here have almost all been Physicists, > and none of them CompScis. When I did my CompSci degree most of the course was fairly low-level theory stuff -- there was very little coding at all. We were learning things like graph theory, principles of database design, lamda calculus, formal language theory, compiler design, microprocessor design, (implementation of) computer graphics, robotics and suchlike. The coding we did was in Pascal, C, Fortran, C++ (which we had to learn from Stroustrup's book because it was the only one in existence), ML and LISP. Oh, and APL, which was just plain weird. It was all UNIX-based, too. But that was twenty years ago, and at Warwick Uni, which certainly had a reputation for having a fairly "hard science" approach at the time. Given that some of the above just isn't relevant today (microprocessor design is probably a degree in itself, and almost no-one implements framebuffer graphics from the ground up) and a good deal of everyday stuff now didn't even exist then, I imagine a more recent degree is a rather different cauldron of piranahs. I wonder how many people these days have even heard of lex and yacc (or flex and bison if you prefer), let alone know what they do or understand how to use them. I imagine it's the same for pretty much all CompSci graduates -- what they learn will very much reflect where and when they took their degree. James -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html