assembly line manned by semi-skilled interchangeable workers is fundamentally flawed and wasteful. It pushes the most competent people out of the field and discourages students from entering it. To break this vicious circle, academia must produce more graduates with relevant skills and industry must adopt tools, techniques, and processes to utilize those skills.

Dreams of Professionalism

“Computer science” is a horrible and misleading term. CS is not primarily about computers and it is not primarily a science. Rather it is about uses of computers and about ways of working and thinking that involves computation (“algorithmic and quantitative thinking”). It combines aspects of science, math, and engineering, often using computers. For almost all people in CS, it is an applied field—“pure CS,” isolated from application, is typically sterile.

What distinguishes a CS person building an application from a professional in some other field (such as medicine or physics) building one? The answer must “be mastery of the core of CS.” What should that “core” be? It would contain much of the established CS curriculum—algorithms, data structures, machine architecture, programming (principled), some math ( primarily to teach proof-based and quantitative reasoning), and systems (such as operating systems and databases). To integrate that knowledge and to get an idea of how to handle larger problems, every student must complete several group projects (you could call that basic software engineering). It is essential that there is a balance between the theoretical and the practical—CS is not just principles and theorems, and it is not just hacking code.

This core is obviously far more “computer-oriented” than the computing field as a whole. Therefore, nobody should be called a computer scientist without adding a specialization within CS (for example, graphics, networking, software architecture, hu-man-machine interactions, security). However that’s still not enough. The practice of computer science is inherently applied and interdisciplinary, so every CS professional should have the equivalent to a minor in some other

field (for example, physics, medical engineering, history, accountancy, French literature).

Experienced educators will observe: “But this is impossible! Hardly any students could master all that in four years.” Those educators are right: something has to give. My suggestion is that the first degree qualifying to practice as a computers scientist should be a master’s—and a master’s designed as a whole—not as a bachelor’s degree with an appended final year or two. People who plan to do research will as usual aim for a Ph.D.

Many professors will object: “I don’t have the time to program!” However, I think that professors who teach students who want to become software professionals will have to make time and their institutions must find ways to reward them for programming. The ultimate goal of CS is to help produce better systems. Would you trust someone who had not seen a patient for years to teach surgery? What would you think of a piano teacher who never touched the keyboard? A CS education must bring a student beyond the necessary book learning to a mastery of its application in complete systems and an appreciation of aesthetics in code.

I use the word “professional.” That’s a word with many meanings and implications. In fields like medicine and engineering, it implies licensing. Licensing is a very tricky and emotional topic. However, our civilization depends on software. Is it reasonable that essentially anyone can modify a critical body of code based on personal taste and corporate policies? If so, will it still be reasonable in 50 years? Is it reasonable that pieces of software on which millions of people depend come without warranties? The real problem is that professionalism enforced through licensing depends on having a large shared body of knowledge, tools, and techniques. A licensed engineer can certify that a building has been constructed using accepted techniques and materials. In the absence of a widely accepted outline of CS competence (as I suggested earlier), I don’t know how to do that for a software application. Today, I wouldn’t even know how to select a group of people to design a licensing test (or realistically a set of

tests for various subspecialties, like the medical boards).

What can industry do to close the gap? It is much more difficult to characterize “industry” and “industrial needs” than to talk about academia. After all, academia has a fairly standard structure and fairly standard approaches to achieving its goals. Industry is far more diverse: large or small, commercial or non-profit, sophisticated or average in their approach to system building, and so forth. Consequently, I can’t even begin to prescribe remedies. However, I have one observation that related directly to the academia/industry gap: Many organizations that rely critically on computing have become dangerously low on technical skills:

Industrial manager: “The in-sourc-ing of technical expertise is critical for survival.”

No organization can remain successful without an institutional memory and an infrastructure to recruit and develop new talent. Increasing collaboration with academics interested in software development might be productive for both parties. Collaborative research and an emphasis on lifelong learning that goes beyond mere training courses could play major roles in this.

conclusion

We must do better. Until we do, our infrastructure will continue to creak, bloat, and soak up resources. Eventually, some part will break in some unpredictable and disastrous way (think of Internet routing, online banking, electronic voting, and control of the electric power grid). In particular, we must shrink the academia/industry gap by making changes on both sides. My suggestion is to define a structure of CS education based on a core plus specializations and application areas, aiming eventually at licensing of software artifacts and at least some of the CS professionals who produce them. This might go hand-in-hand with an emphasis on lifelong industry/academia involvement for technical experts.

 

Bjarne Stroustrup ( [e-mail]) is the College of engineering Chair in Computer science Professor at texas a&M university in College station, tx.