(I mean programming)
As a matter of fact we have nearly 19000 IT students now in Jordan, by adding those that learnt programming not by university the number rises to the double, a number much bigger than market needs. I will show with this post a reason for why computer science students are many times better than other programmers, I intend with 'other' those even know a programming language through a teaching centre, by self-learning or even computer engineering and CIS students.

Yesterday, I've finally delivered my term paper for the PL course (In the department we abbreviate concepts of programming languages by PL or CPL). In the term paper we have to write up the major differences between three important program languages, these languages are chosen randomly, mine were Smalltalk, C and LISP.

Majority of students were initially unenthusiastic of the course, the fact we studied a detailed history of programming languages including FORTRAN, COBOL and ALGOL was not so interesting neither of practical use, but things changed when we began to understand the real 'spirit' of programming, not to know how to program but to know what is programming.

First-year programming courses will teach you how to get a result by a number of steps, you are totally obscured of what is made behind the scenes, what the compiler does, what you are really doing when you write a statement or what this programming language have some constraints or not.

A good programmer should have a practical knowledge of a language, but this is founded on fundamental theoretical approaches, It's not just chance that we study automata theory, discrete mathematics, Chomsky's hierarchy and hundreds of other topics. Without these essentials it seems difficult, or impossible to really understand the significance of implementation or the meaning of any program.

Labels: JUST