“A school’s top student in IT will probably be the one who knows how to work a spreadsheet and u

Here’s a company trying to get the kids interested in real-world software
development. Are the schools really that out of touch?

<http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/schools-in-for-open-source-advocates>

 

Yes, I think so. I base my opinion on the experience of my son, just
finished school last year. I did more programming at school 30-odd
years ago than he needed to complete the curriculum. There was some
good emphasis on a development life cycle, and the documentation
thereof; he's learned earlier than I did what a chore it can be.
"work a spreadsheet and use Photoshop" is understating things
substantially, throw in some HTML, Word, SQL (only one table at a
time, though) and a few others I imagine.

(Some minimal help and attitude from me a few years ago and he was
away, to the detriment of his classmates' education; they just got him
to do their coding.)

In principle it's not the schools' faults, rather the curriculum,
whoever sets that.

Regards, John

 

In message

Did he do any rapid prototyping/incremental development? Use of version
control?

I don’t find documentation to be a “choreâ€.

 

I'll have to ask him.

Well, what can I say? Fulfilling the expectations of other people
(f.ex. PHBs, accountants, incompetents, ...) in documentation is never
a chore?

Regards, John

 

In message

It’s all part of making a finished product. Do you find debugging a “chore�
I find there can be a lot of satisfaction in tracking down and squashing
bugs. And in writing good documentation.

 

Tricky. Good coders aren’t always good at expressing themselves in human
language.

I’ve contributed to one or two open-source projects by a) figuring out what
the code is doing, and b) documenting it, in comments or elsewhere.

 

Yes, some tasks were approached this way.

No.

Regards, John

 

In message

I highly recommend he look at it. Even for a single person working alone, it
helps maintain a complete development history, let you pursue alternative
ideas, etc. This gives you the confidence to try new things and dump old
ones, secure in the knowledge that you can always go back if you have to.

 

Yeah, one of those lessons one doesn't have to learn the hard way.

Regards, John