Modern software development concepts

Abstract

Software development is an art. The most noteworthy computer science monograph of the 2 0 ~ century was, after all, KIUWS "The ~ r t of Computer Programming" ~ ~ : / / ~ ~ ~. ~ e r i c a n ~ c i e n t i S f. 0 r ~ t e m u l a t e / B o o k R e v i e w T v ~ D e ~ ~ ~ s e t i ~ Z 6 5 75;_isessi onid=aaa6UkBHDVJBav [l]. One of the starting points for this column is Knuth's Turing award, a discussion of art in computer science [2]. Art is a word with many meanings. It originally referred to skill of joining or fitting. (Much [too much for we traditionalists] of software creation these days is the art of connecting existing pieces.) The meaning of "art" expanded to the system of principles and rules for attaining a desired end. Art stands in contrast to science, engineering, manufhcturing, and fashion. Science distills knowledge into principles and laws; art recognizes that there are human choices in activities. Combine art with an attention to economy and one gets engineering, like the computer science holy grail of "software engineering." Do something following a well-defined and low-skill plan and one gets rnanufhcturing. Choosing among equivalent possibilities is fashion. Designing a computer is an art. Designing one that people will buy is engineering. Building one from that design is manufacturing. Picking the color for the computer case is fashion. (Art is also a synonym for necromancy, a topic of clear relevance to computer science.) Art also refers to the use of skill to create that which is esthetically or intellectually pleasing. Fine arts show an intellectual progression through the ages, shaped by new technology (e.g., casting, cameras, computers), shifting economic forces (the decline of

Having a BLAST

“…The first assignment involves finding and counting substrings within a list of longer strings, and can be done at the beginning of CS2. It is similar to word frequency examples and problems in [4,6,11,17]. The second assignment, which requires search techniques, lists, and hash tables, is to develop an implementation of a simplified version of BLAST.…”

“…A review of a number of data structures textbooks [4,6,11,17] and the SIGCSE literature shows that bioinformatics is not (yet) a common domain from which to design CS2 examples and projects. The project described in this paper is a real-world, comprehensive bioinformatics project that can be implemented incrementally.…”

CS2 for an IS curriculum

“…[2] This view can be summarized in the words of Tymann and Schneider [3] Of course, students must know some basic data structure concepts, and a CS2 course cannot treat the topic of data structures solely as a black box -"Don't ask, just use this one!" If one were to take that approach, students would not be able to make informed decisions about which data structures work best for a given problem.…”

Java IO and testing made simple

“…Textbooks for introductory courses in Algorithms and Data Structures typically say very little about the use of file input, or omit the issue altogether [2,12,15,13,19]. However, the only way students can understand the meaning of algorithmic complexity and the need for stress tests for their programs is to run their programs with realistic large data sets that illustrate the concepts presented in a theoretical framework.…”