Communications - May 2012

ming assignments—which the testing and code evaluation tools of Rails can help grade—thereby allowing us to offer a MOOC with 50,000 students.

˲ Colleagues in industry like it because it addresses several of their concerns. An example is this quote from a Googler: “I think what you’re doing in your class is amazing. I’d be far more likely to prefer graduates of this program than any other I’ve seen. As you know, we’re not a Ruby shop, but I feel this is a good choice for the class to be able to get real features done. Java or C++ would take forever.” 4

We received similar comments from colleagues at Amazon, eBay, and Microsoft, none of which are “Ruby shops.” As we expected, leading software companies prefer students learn important ideas rather than steer us to teach specific languages and tools used inside those companies.

We believe Agile+Cloud+Rails can turn a perceived weakness of the CS curriculum into a potential strength. If you are a potentially interested instructor, we would be happy to help you cross the long-standing chasm between what industry recommends and what academia offers.

References

1. begel, a. and Simon, b. novice software developers, all over again. in ICER ‘08: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Computing Education Research (Sept. 2008).

2. feathers, M. Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Prentice hall, 2004.

3. fox, a. and Patterson, d. Software engineering for Software as a Service; http://www.saas-class.org, March 2012 and May 2012.

4. green, b. Private communication, 2011.

5. ieee. guide to the Software engineering body of knowledge (SWebok), 2004.

6. Ji, f. and Sedano, t. comparing extreme programming and waterfall project results. Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training 2011 (2011).

7. Patterson, d.a. and hennessy, J.l. Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface. revised 4th edition, Morgan kaufmann Publishers, 2012.

8. Stella, l.f.f., Jarzabek, S. and Wadhwa, b. a comparative study of maintainability of Web applications on J2ee, .net, and ruby on rails. WSE 2008. 10th International Symposium on Web Site Evolution (oct. 3–4, 2008), 93–99.

Armando Fox ( fox@cs.berkeley.edu) is an adjunct
associate professor at Uc berkeley and a co-founder of
the berkeley rad lab.
David Patterson ( pattrsn@cs.berkeley.edu) is the
e.h. and M.e. Pardee chair of computer Science at Uc
berkeley and is a past president of acM.

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We thank our colleagues at amazon Web Services, ebay, facebook, github, google, heroku, Microsoft, and Pivotal labs for their feedback and suggestions on this Viewpoint, for their support and feedback during the development of the course, and for their donations of services to support the online course.