What to Keep and What to Throw Away, Part 1

by Ken Orr

Recently, my colleagues on the Cutter Business Technology Council got into a very heated exchange on the state-of-the-art in software development. A couple of members of the Council were particularly disturbed by the level of knowledge in fundamental principles that some of their recent computer science graduates were exhibiting. Over the next couple of hours, this wave of dialog extended to colleagues of my colleagues and lots of opinions came rushing in. On the whole, the responses were similar: some time in the last decade, major elements of what professional developers need to know somehow got dropped from the CS curriculum.