[plug] Uni Course - UWA or Curtin?

[Greg Mildenhall]

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001 fvalton_lists at yahoo.com wrote:
[Talking about UWA CS]
> Neither CS nor IT streams offer any industry experience, which at
> this late stage in my degree is something I regret.

Actually, a "practicum" (a minimum of 8 weeks' work experience in an 
software-related workplace) is now a mandatory part of both the computer
science and software engineering degrees. You can still avoid it by doing
a Bachelor of Science or Bach of Comp sci. and Maths.

> Yeah UWA has UCC. It's quite removed from the CS building though,

But it's so _close_ to the tavern. :)

> UWA's CS dept. seems to position itself as an Academic
> computing department, (you do come out with solid theoritical
> foundations)
[but]
> I'm not sure that UWA does such a good job at preparing
> it's graduates for the workplace.

Not for their first job, no, but I think it does a better job of preparing
graduates for their nth job, when none of the _technology_ they learnt at
uni is relevant anymore, but the _science_ is as it always was.

> The main languages taught (outside of academic languages such
> as Prolog or Haskell)

Haskell is actually a general-purpose language, it is just not widely used
for reasons that escape me. By proportion, it is used a lot more in
academia, mainly because academia has people that know what languages are
out there. Also because it is particularly good for teaching, but only in
the way that it is particularly good for most things.

> are VB, Java, and ANSI C.

And a disturbing trend towards Matlab for engineering-related courses.

> I did do some UNIX scripting, but that unit seems to have bitten the 
> dust.

Pout. I really enjoyed that unit, too. Wrote my first sed script. :)

> The omission here is C++.

C++ is taught as a language, (as part of the second-year OOP unit) but
thankfully all later courses are now based on Java or C instead.

-Greg