[Techtalk] Theory vs. practice

[Malcolm&]

On Monday 14 January 2002 06:15 pm,  Mary Gardiner wrote:

> I think good software engineering is part of the answer, but maybe I
> should wait for someone whose university actually gave them a course on
> it to give their opinion...

Mine did. Sort of. There wasn't a special "buffer overflow" lecture or
anything, it was just part of being taught how to program. You check
your inputs, you watch for overflows and "off by one" errors and other
edge cases. We were speficially required to test edge cases (and if we
didn't, the folks who graded our work would).

> I now hold a computer science degree, which at my university now means a
> three year programming course without ever having taken a course in software
> engineering principles or techniques.

That's just plain scary. It explains some of the people I run into
(I had someone complain about me using "big words" recently when asking
what the options for doing some code migration were. I didn't know
'refactoring' was a big word).




-- 
"That's not fair!" 
"You say that so often, I wonder what your basis for comparison is?"
- Sarah and Jareth, Labrynth

<<------------------------------------------------------------------>>
<<  This email is monitored by the US government under the auspice  >>
<< of the USA act. For private communication, ask me for my PGP key >>