Sharing homework on Github

[kcrisman]

Seems relevant and possibly related to e.g. SMC or sagenb - we have already had many discussions of this type in some of the education circles about "homework with Sage".

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/university-bans-github-homework-changes-mind/

[Volker Braun]

Clearly they are in the business of reinventing the wheel ever year, with each generation of students. Coincidentally, I read something today that resonated with me on that issue:

"Real Software Engineering is still in the future. There is nothing in current SE that is like the construction of the Empire State building in less than a year by less than 3000 people: they used powerful ideas and power tools that we don’t yet have in software development. If software does “engineering” at all, it is too often at the same level as the ancient Egyptians before the invention of the arch (literally before the making of arches: architecture), who made large structures with hundreds of thousands of slaves toiling for decades to pile stone upon stone: they used weak ideas and weak tools, pretty much like most software development today." 

From: Is “Software Engineering” an Oxymoron? By Alan Kay 

http://web.archive.org/web/20030407181600/www.opencroquet.org/downloads/Croquet0.1.pdf

[William Stein]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 2:24 PM, Volker Braun <vbrau...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Clearly they are in the business of reinventing the wheel ever year, with

Just curious -- who is "they"?

> each generation of students. Coincidentally, I read something today that
> resonated with me on that issue:

> "Real Software Engineering is still in the future. There is nothing in
> current SE that is like the construction of the Empire State building in
> less than a year by less than 3000 people: they used powerful ideas and
> power tools that we don't yet have in software development. If software does
> "engineering" at all, it is too often at the same level as the ancient
> Egyptians before the invention of the arch (literally before the making of
> arches: architecture), who made large structures with hundreds of thousands
> of slaves toiling for decades to pile stone upon stone: they used weak ideas
> and weak tools, pretty much like most software development today."
>
> From: Is "Software Engineering" an Oxymoron? By Alan Kay
> http://web.archive.org/web/20030407181600/www.opencroquet.org/downloads/Croquet0.1.pdf
>

Indeed. From personal experience, construction projects are totally
completely different than software engineering. I was recently involved in
a slightly nontrivial construction project (where I did probably the second most
work) to build the biggest skateboard ramp in the northwest... and thought
a lot about how that compares to building sage.

-- William

>
> On Tuesday, February 17, 2015 at 7:39:17 PM UTC+1, kcrisman wrote:
>>
>> Seems relevant and possibly related to e.g. SMC or sagenb - we have
>> already had many discussions of this type in some of the education circles
>> about "homework with Sage".
>>
>> http://www.wired.com/2015/02/university-bans-github-homework-changes-mind/
>

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--
William (http://wstein.org)

[Volker Braun]

On Tuesday, February 17, 2015 at 8:46:57 PM UTC+1, William wrote:

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 2:24 PM, Volker Braun <vbrau...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Clearly they are in the business of reinventing the wheel ever year, with
Just curious -- who is "they"?

Well TFA was about the University of Illinois, but its not like its a particularly rare frame of mind.

[William Stein]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 11:45 PM, Ralf Stephan <gtr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Not to mutate this thread but comparing software with buildings
> rarely takes requirement changes into account, like changed use
> of buildings, or, with Sage, tool changes like Py2-->3. Which
> seems stalling at a point where the easy fixes are done, and
> concerted effort is needed to tackle the hard ones.
>
> http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/16537

I also want to be careful with the timing of that change. My
nightmare is that Sage switches to Py3 completely, and thousands of
people desperately want to use third party package X from pypi, but
can't because it only supports Py2. This might be a very real issue
today.

Of course, optimal would be for Sage to support Py2 and Py3
simultaneously. That would be fantastic. I'll fund a workshop on
this soon....

>
> Regards,
>
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