Ben J. Christensen

Last week I learned how to program on the iPhone using Objective-C and Cocoa Touch by having two 2-hour pair programming sessions with Brent Coursey and about 8 hours of my own playing around.

I am comfortable now with XCode, Interface Building and Objective-C – enough that I can build code to do what I want it to do, compile, run, debug, test and install on my personal iPhone.

I’ve connected to web services via Objective-C and built a user interface to interact with the services.

All in all it was a good experience and great way to learn – and the pair programming was very useful in speeding up the learning process. Unlike 10 years ago where I plenty of time to learn through trial and error, it was much more effective to sit and watch someone and see how everything worked together. I was able to pick it up very quickly that way.

Of course, 10+ years of object oriented programming in Java translates over well to the thinking and expectations – but the syntax and different ways of doing things were far from natural for a java programmer (especially one who had respectfully ignored the C way of doing things), so the demonstration received through pairing was immediately beneficial. (On second thought, ignoring C probably helped since I saw Objective-C as an OO language from the start – not as C)

A 2 hour session with Kent Beck sold on EBay for $405. That would be quite the experience – would love to do that and see how he or someone else at his level does their craft.

These guys are “computer scientists”.

Being a programmer, developer, architect etc does not in my opinion constitute being a “computer scientist” or working in “computer science”.

Perhaps the most general definition of science can be used for “developers” if we stretch:

- a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws: the mathematical sciences.

But that doesn’t describe the whole of it like these definitions do:

- systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.

- knowledge, as of facts or principles; knowledge gained by systematic study.

As programmers we don’t do this – we use technology (the “applied science”) to build things and solve problems.

We may sometimes pretend to venture into “science” as we “research solutions” – but we’re just looking for knowledge and facts the “scientists” have figured out and then applying them in unique and novel ways.

Calling a programmer a scientist is like calling an artist a chemist because they use chemical compounds (paint, graphite, clay, steel, glue whatever).

Why does this matter to me?

Because by training our programmers in theoretical “Computer Science” educational programs, we are not actually creating employable or productive people. Sure, they have basic skills and theory that can then be applied through further effort – but unless they are one of the rare few to study, analyze and experiment with computer science theory – most of the knowledge gained serves little to no value in applying the techology of software development in real-world programming of software.