The Spanish version of this post is my translation of an article published by Bjarne Stroustrup in Communications of the ACM in January 2010. Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of the C++ language. Here is a short excerpt of the original.

What should we teach new software developers? Why?

by Bjarne Stroustrup.

Published in Communications of the ACM (original text)
Vol. 53 No. 1, Pages 40-42
10.1145/1629175.1629192

Computer science must be at the center of software systems development. If it is not, we must rely on individual experience and rules of thumb, ending up with less capable, less reliable systems, developed and maintained at unnecessarily high cost. We need changes in education to allow for improvements of industrial practice.

The article covers the problem (the disconnect between computer science education and what industry needs), why it matters even if your computer hasn’t crashed lately, the academia/industry gap, and dreams of professionalism, before reaching its conclusion.

Stroustrup closes by suggesting a structure of CS education based on a core plus specializations and application areas, aiming eventually at licensing(1) of software artifacts and of at least some of the professionals who produce them. The rest is in the original text.

Bjarne Stroustrup is the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science Professor at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX.

Notes:

\(1\) To understand why Stroustrup says the subject of licensing is controversial I suggest reading this document. Licensing refers to the certification of professionals by some body so that they can practice, as happens with lawyers and the supreme court, or with professional associations in various countries.

\(2\) In the Spanish translation I used the term “computación” where the author used computer science (CS), and kept the original term in some paragraphs to try to preserve the meaning of the text.

No machine translator was used for the Spanish translation. It probably has many errors; I will appreciate your comments and improvements.