[plt-scheme] Perplexed Programmers

My answer/question was a bit flip but it came straight from the heart  
of someone who has taught freshmen a dozen times since 1992. The  
"product" I get to see is so under-educated that I have to think that  
the many many more billions that parents and taxpayers spend on  
public schools are even more wasted than the $95M that the LA ISD  
spent for a partially correct program.

In addition, I believe that the education of programmers is seriously  
flawed, starting with how-to-code-in-24-minutes, on to high school CS  
education, college and MS cash-cow programs. As my sons' piano and  
saxophone teachers used to say, the first year sets the tone. The  
habits that you pick up there dominate your internalization. (Some  
of) those of us who have overcome this tone-setting experience are on  
this list. We tend to be highly introspective people.

For specific failures like that, I tend to believe that both  
programmers and managers are at fault:

* Thesis: Code has two users. The first are the ones who interact  
with the program after deployment. The second are the programmers who  
look at the code after it was created, read it, and modify it. This  
happens during development as well as maintenance. I conjecture that  
the concerns for the two communities are related. [

* Managers should represent both users. They are the feedback element  
during the development cycle. They barely succeed with representing  
the first group and are never educated enough to represent the second  
one. Even though business programs teach discount and opportunity  
cost and everything, managers just don't understand this point when  
applied to software.

* Result: Code is considered successful if it kind of works for the  
interacting community and is roughly on time. XP succeeds [more than  
regular programming] because it replaces Managers with real Customers  
during the development cycle and always focuses on feature  
interaction. They thus get better trained programmers, just like  
shops in the spirit of JaneStreet.

* Programmers should understand the issues, even if they can't do all  
the business evaluations. If they see things going wrong, they should  
push back. They don't.

* The people who could see it all are those who train programmers and  
have a modicum of business sense. Or at least those who set the  
curricula. This is where I lay the largest blame but it's a long-term  
problem and could be seen if enough push-back from enlightened  
programmers and managers came in.

[This whole thesis is the premise of my HtDP, HtDC, and HtDS; and the  
last bullet is perhaps the reason why this is the case.]

-- Matthias