Comments on: The law of leaky abstractions http://timwhitlock.info/blog/2009/01/17/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/ Tim Whitlock's personal site and blog Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:28:17 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Pixelmixer http://timwhitlock.info/blog/2009/01/17/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/#comment-54 Pixelmixer Sun, 18 Jan 2009 03:07:08 +0000 http://web.2point1.com/2009/01/17/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/#comment-54 I see this abstraction happen quite a bit. I am still a student. A senior Telecommunications Major at Ball State in Indiana. The part that really hit me hard, when I took on a TCOM major instead of a CS major I was looking to learn the side of development that I really didn't know much about. I already had the CS stuff down pretty well. Once I actually got into the classes I was appalled at what I was seeing. THE "programming" class was made up entirely of a professor teaching the front end of Dreamweaver to students who have no experience with HTML or how it works. I started teaching workshops on campus a few years ago to give these students a little more depth in this. I taught "advanced" dreamweaver workshops as well as "advanced" flash workshops where I took the students out of their comfort zone and taught them HTML and AS 2/3 so they could fix stuff when something went wrong. If this says anything about the abstraction and how bad it got for a while, about 75% of the students who came to me for help had absolutely no idea why their photos weren't showing up on their website when they uploaded the HTML file to their server. On the CS side of things, I noticed them being taught things like Wordpress programming, or SecondLife programming (another big one). Most of them wouldn't even delve into the 'too complicated' world of javascript, not even to mention AJAX. I guess that's just what happens when the professors get lazy and start teaching the lazy ways to do everything. (I ran into a Journalism professor who taught flash programming and managed to teach using only behaviors for everything she did).... on a side note I was kind of impressed by how much she was able to accomplish with those and was able to make it so far without knowing how to write anything in actionscript past play/stop, and gotoAndPlay/Stop. just my little rant that's slightly off topic I suppose. I see this abstraction happen quite a bit. I am still a student. A senior Telecommunications Major at Ball State in Indiana. The part that really hit me hard, when I took on a TCOM major instead of a CS major I was looking to learn the side of development that I really didn’t know much about. I already had the CS stuff down pretty well. Once I actually got into the classes I was appalled at what I was seeing.

THE “programming” class was made up entirely of a professor teaching the front end of Dreamweaver to students who have no experience with HTML or how it works. I started teaching workshops on campus a few years ago to give these students a little more depth in this. I taught “advanced” dreamweaver workshops as well as “advanced” flash workshops where I took the students out of their comfort zone and taught them HTML and AS 2/3 so they could fix stuff when something went wrong.

If this says anything about the abstraction and how bad it got for a while, about 75% of the students who came to me for help had absolutely no idea why their photos weren’t showing up on their website when they uploaded the HTML file to their server.

On the CS side of things, I noticed them being taught things like WordPress programming, or SecondLife programming (another big one). Most of them wouldn’t even delve into the ‘too complicated’ world of javascript, not even to mention AJAX.

I guess that’s just what happens when the professors get lazy and start teaching the lazy ways to do everything. (I ran into a Journalism professor who taught flash programming and managed to teach using only behaviors for everything she did)…. on a side note I was kind of impressed by how much she was able to accomplish with those and was able to make it so far without knowing how to write anything in actionscript past play/stop, and gotoAndPlay/Stop.

just my little rant that’s slightly off topic I suppose.

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