It’s clear there is a kind of disconnect in CS undergraduate education. A lot of undergraduates are concerned about having specific skills that they think employers want so they can get good jobs after school. Clearly employers are also concerned that students seem to enter the workforce without the requisite skillset to be productive in the near term.

But what we see is that if you put too much focus on learning the ins and outs of a particular language and not on the theory of computation then the ability to think methodically about a particular problem type is lost. If all you have is a really good understanding of Java, then you don’t understand how optimizing the data structures you use can have a significant impact on the efficiency of your code. The result is slow, buggy code.

My point is that the theory part isn’t unimportant but it isn’t all-encompassing either. You need good doses of both to really be effective as a programmer. It’s a lucky fact that at HES, you really do get both. There are courses in Oracle as well as courses in Databases (information management). One class reinforces the other in scope and depth.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/09/1858220

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/08/0348239&tid=146

For many people, the focus *does* seem to be on languages.