TITLE: Fear and Loathing in the Computer Lab AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: October 05, 2007 4:45 PM DESC: ----- BODY: I occasionally write about how students these days don't want to program. Not only don't they want to do it for a living, they don't even want to learn how. I have seen this manifested in a virtual disappearance of non-majors from our intro courses, and I have heard it expressed by many prospective CS majors, especially students interested in our networking and system administration majors. First of all, let me clarify something. When I say talk about students not wanting to program, one of my colleagues chafes, because he thinks I mean that this is an unchangeable condition of the universe. I don't. I think that the world could change in a way that kids grow up wanting to program again, the way some kids in my generation did. Furthermore, I think that we in computer science can and should help try to create this change. But the simple fact is that nearly all the students who come to the university these days do not want to write programs, or learn how to do so. If you are interested in this issue, you should definitely read Mark Guzdial's blog. Actually, you should read it in any case -- it's quite good. But he has written passionately about this particular phenomenon on several occasions. I first read his ideas on this topic in last year's entry Students find programming distasteful, which described experiences with non-majors working in disciplines where computational modeling are essential to future advances.

This isn't about not liking programming as a job choice -- this isn't about avoiding facing a cubicle engaged in long, asocial hours hacking. This is about using programming as a useful tool in a non-CS course. It's unlikely that most of the students in the Physics class have even had any programming, and yet they're willing to drop a required course to avoid it.

In two recent posts [ 1 | 2 ], Mark speculates that the part of the problem involving CS majors may derive from our emphasis on software engineering principles, even early in the curriculum. One result is an impression that computer science is "serious":

We lead students to being able to create well-engineered code, not necessarily particularly interesting code.

One result of that result is that students speak of becoming a programmer as if this noble profession has its own chamber in one of the middle circles in Dante's hell. I understand the need for treating software development seriously. We want the people who write the software we use and depend upon every day to work. We want much of it to work all the time. That sounds serious. Companies will hire our graduates, and they want the software that our graduates write to work -- all the time, or at least better than the software of their competitors. That sounds serious, too. Mark points out that, while this requirement on our majors calls for students to master engineering practice, it does "not necessarily mesh with good science practice".

In general, code that is about great ideas is not typically neat and clean. Instead, the code for the great programs and for solving scientific problems is brilliant.

And -- here is the key -- our students want to be creative, not mundane. Don't get me wrong here. I recently wrote on the software engineering metaphor as mythology, and now I am taking a position that could be viewed as blaming software engineering for the decline of computer science. I'm not. I do understand the realities of the world our grads will live in, and I do understand the need for serious software developers. I have supported our software engineering faculty and their curriculum proposals, including a new program in software testing. I even went to the wall for an unsuccessful curriculum proposal that created some bad political feelings with a sister institution. I just don't want us to close the door to our students' desire to be brilliant. I don't want to close the door on what excites me about programming. And I don't want to present a face of computing that turns off students -- whether they might want to be computer scientists, or whether they will be the future scientists, economists, and humanists who use our medium to change the world in the ways of those disciplines. Thinking cool ideas -- ideas that are cool to the thinker -- and making them happen is intellectually rewarding. Computer programming is a new medium that empowers people to realize their ideas in a way that has never been available to humankind before. As Mark notes in his most recent article on this topic, realizing one's own designs also motivates students to want to learn, and to work to do it. We can use the power of our own discipline to motivate people to sample it, either taking what they need with them to other pastures or staying and helping us advance the discipline. But in so many ways we shoot ourselves in the foot:

Spending more time on comments, assertions, preconditions, and postconditions than on the code itself is an embarrassment to our field.

Amen, Brother Mark. I need to do more to advance this vision. I'm moving slowly, but I'm on the track. And I'm following good leaders. -----