Hacker News Reader

Comment by fuggedaboudit | Hacker News Reader

I have an issue with that: law school and medical school certainly do not teach you how to practice law or medicine. Computer science sounds akin to both: you get theoretical underpinnings (many of which are outdated or will be unneeded for your specialty) but all your actual learning is on the job.

View on HN

Agreed. I've done both law and programming. Law school categorically does not even try to teach aspiring lawyers how to practice. The classic curriculum is designed to teach you how to "think like a lawyer." There are exceptions here and there, but if you want practical skills, you have to deliberately look for the handful of seminars and clinics that teach them.

Between learning to program and learning to practice law, once you get past your chosen programming language's syntax and a few core CS concepts - learning to program is much easier.

Learning how to do X can be very easy if you accept an arbitrary level of competence as enough to claim "I know how to X".

I have the feeling that a lot of people can believe they have learned to program while all what they did is to go past their chosen programming language syntax and grasped a few core CS concepts.

That's quite a low barrier to entry, but if that's what people mean when they hear the word "programming", then I'd argue that Software Engineering would be a better name for the field we're here comparing with practising law.

Don't let the electrical and hardware engineers hear you say that, that'll just open the old debate about whether software engineering is really engineering at all. (Kidding.)

In the UK the practical skills are taught postgraduate in a Legal Practice Course.

To become a good programmer you need either a gift (which some young people have) or experience -- lots of experience. A CS education gives you a good foundation, but you still need to learn so much more: software engineering practices, lots and lots of details, a variety of programming languages and their huge libraries, mistakes mistakes mistakes (so you can learn the patterns, so you can spot them in code reviews, so you can avoid making them again, ...), full-stack-ness (so you can scale, so you can foresee problems before they strike), ...

To be honest I'm not really sure how it works in the US, but in the UK if a doctor has passed their exams to become a registrar, they are by that time reasonably competent to practice their chosen speciality (except for surgeons). Obviously being a doctor requires a lot of practical on-the-job training but the point is the whole process is managed top-down.

Programming education is totally ad-hoc and you can be a great programmer even with a degree in agriculture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com