The main reason for this is because self-taught programmers FOCUS ON ONE LANGUAGE. I realized that I went through all the courses I needed to learn from university in different programming languages for some strange reason, and that just left me all over the place as a developer.
It is an easy fix, teach only one language for the 6 core areas of programming, namely:
1) Intro to programming (variables, loops, conditions etc. up to functions)
2) Complexity management, usually OOP
3) Building a GUI (it is not trivial and needs to be a course on its own)
4) Connecting to a database (also not trivial)
5) Data Structures and Algorithms
6) Compilers and programming languages (basically popping the hood of programming)
In school, after learning OOP in Java we switched to web dev and learned javascript and php. We completely abandoned learning GUI and DB for java.
Algorithms was taught by a visiting lecturer in C++ and after mid-sem we switched to Data Structures in java??
The universities are doing a fine job, but please just stick to one programming language for these core areas and everything will be great.
I came to this conclusion before AI took over. It will be interesting to see how AI changes the Computer Science curriculum in the years to come.
Social media is lipstick on a pig. There's verbal and physical abuse, exclusion, name-calling, stalking and all sorts of inhumane behaviour towards each other in real life. Social media just digitizes that and is a reflection of the ugly parts of the socializing aspect of human life.
The ~10% good that comes from keeping in touch with people, for example, is not really worth it especially for kids.
Whatever you do you are going to have to deal with the negative aspects of society in-person, and we've all kind of accepted that. Social media just doubles the problem.
Could a not-too trivial example like the difference between a Java sudoko solver and a lisp version with all the bells and whistles of FP such as functions as data and return values, recursion and macros be used to illustrate the benefits?
It is an easy fix, teach only one language for the 6 core areas of programming, namely:
1) Intro to programming (variables, loops, conditions etc. up to functions) 2) Complexity management, usually OOP 3) Building a GUI (it is not trivial and needs to be a course on its own) 4) Connecting to a database (also not trivial) 5) Data Structures and Algorithms 6) Compilers and programming languages (basically popping the hood of programming)
In school, after learning OOP in Java we switched to web dev and learned javascript and php. We completely abandoned learning GUI and DB for java.
Algorithms was taught by a visiting lecturer in C++ and after mid-sem we switched to Data Structures in java??
The universities are doing a fine job, but please just stick to one programming language for these core areas and everything will be great.
I came to this conclusion before AI took over. It will be interesting to see how AI changes the Computer Science curriculum in the years to come.