Justin – thank you for sharing! Your situation is quite representative of a promising computer science student, held back by the flaws of the educational system. Just take control, push your own boundaries and hold on – it gets better

@M Easter, Woofster – alright, so creativity is not desired in routine, code-monkey tasks. Though Engineers and Computer Scientists don’t want to code monkey around either. Creativity is essential to solving new problems and pushing the boundaries of existing technology.

So yes – programming _is_ applied math. The said math can also be applied in new, creative ways for fun and profit.

I’m not sure that we want engineers to be poets, but we do want them to be composers. To know that there are a variety of compositional tools at their disposal, and there is a standard approach of knowing when to use them.

It may well be a romantic whimsy, but I see the works by Knuth, a great algorithm book like CLR, etc as being on par with the scores of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach. They should be studied with a view to that sense of virtuosity. Also, E Raymond’s book on the philosophy of Unix is a great “computational appreciation”.

It is true that often engineers are stuck in rather routine situations. In the musical analogy, we are writing jingles for commercials and can’t really take chances with creativity. A jingle for McD’s that starts with a weird Chopin chord change isn’t going to fly. Neither will a payroll system that is based entirely on Ruby closures.

But the awareness of where we are on the spectrum, and the sense of wonder for “the greats” is of tremendous value.

What’s more, it could energize young students. I’m not sure that “don’t kid yourself: coding is applied math” is exactly the message we want to send. At the very least we could say:

“coding is a working with a particular instance of a Turing machine, which is very much _pure_ math. Speaking of Turing, let me tell you about this fantastic computational composer……”

KL

The temptation lies with the knowledge that coding — past a certain point of complexity, and given certain problem domains — frequently involves a considerable amount of creativity on the part of the coder. In my experience, however, a great deal of that creativity given even typically complex problem domains involves a filling in for inexperience which, in the long run, is merely a reinventing of the wheel. In a perfect world, in fact, free-wheeling creativity is not really what we want from programmers. What we want is programs which work, reliably and bug-free. Creativity may be called for in the inteface, or in optimization of operations, data storage, etc. But we don’t want engineers to be poets, not really. We want them to be smart, certainly, and able to translate demanding requirements into a semblance of simplicity — but poets?

The best, most successful poetry frequently relies on ambiguity and irresolvability. Very often the most profound poems point to tensions in the human experience — a way of looking at the world which teaches us about ourselves and which instructs in recreating the “feeling of the feeling” of a certain emotional experience. It is true that rigorous analysis is called for in English classes, but the character of this analysis is never pointing towards coming up with a provable solution to a literary problem.

As a coder I do understand what this post is trying to say, because I’ve had, many times, to employ creativity in solving problems. But in the end I think that this is fundamentally a mathematical exercise. There’s really no getting around the fact that coding is applied math. Not as much fun as a metaphor, but perhaps more apt in looking at the real problem of students not understanding basic concepts (and also more apt in understanding why coding may “feel” more like music, which has many mathematical facets).

Just my .02.

However, I think that music provides a much better analogy than poetry or English lit.

Music, particularly classical music has these ideas:

– a culture of architecture and patterns
– a strong sense of “creativity within certain rules” combined with a rare, breath-taking applications of “breaking the rules” for certain effect
– a long history of master composers and apprentices learning from the masters
– many large-scale undertakings (e.g. symphony) where there are many layers and a lot of things going on at one time, which if not handled correctly, can be chaos

As I write this, my inner voice is reminding me that poetry has similar ideas. But somehow, music seems like a stronger metaphor. Perhaps it comes from pair-programming: one can _see_ 2 people sitting at a piano, working out ideas, creating etc. I don’t get that sense with respect to writing.

KL

I definitely agree that the survey of languages is a terrible way to learn. It confuses new people and leaves them with no real understanding of anything.

The problem with that is that they will learn the ruby way or the C way of doing things and they will pick up some very bad habits which will eventually lead them to write C code in LISP (OK so that’s a stretch but you get the idea).

Is it possible to teach these concepts without coding? I’ve always liked the tactile approach of getting a bunch of people to be data and then some other person to organize that data somehow and then describe how they do it. Getting students to “discover” bubble-sort this way is awesome fun.

Could the concept of a repeated task, until a condition is met, be explained without using the term for loop or a paramount concern of how many semi-colons it requires?

I’ve heard of Computer Science classes where the same material was taught in grades 10, 11, and 12 – just with a different programming languages each year. Great, kids will know how to write “for loop” in 3 different ways, and still not understand as to why.