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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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7 February 2003 - 2:16 am
Computer Science students here at WashU (and engineers in general?) have the annoying tendency to refer to all classes by number. To a certain extent, this is explained by the fact that our courses are named things like "Developing Object Oriented Software with Patterns and Frameworks" and "Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata" (CS 342 and CS 507, respectively), but it leads to conversation that go something like this:
my mom: What are you taking this semester?Really, its just a secret language we use to keep from having to explain that what we do isn't really that complicated; it protects the myth that we practice pagan rituals and make sacrifices to the binary gods one and zero in order to get the computers to do our bidding.
me: 506, 525, and 554.
Anyway, I've noticed an odd corollary. When I leave the engineering school (well, I don't physically leave it, since my class is in Cupples II 220) for other classes, I never refer to them by number. (I also try to avoid ever referring to them, but that's another post.) My Modern Japan class, for example, is History 320. I never refer to it as 320 or even History 320, even when in conversations with people who have taken the class and would know what I was talking about. But if I take a class in another engineering discipline, I always refer to it by its number. SSM 317, EE 280 and EE 250 are all good examples. So I wonder, are engineers predisposed towards being non-communicative, or is it something we develop after spending time in an environment where we intentionally obfuscate even simple things like the classes we're taking?
(An interesting side note. Even when forced to actually name our classes, we have a second layer of obfuscation to fall back on. Most classes have shorter, well-known and understood names that appear nowhere in the course listings. For example, CS 431 is formally titled "Translation of Computer Languages," but it is always referred to simply as "Compilers." CS 455, formally titled "Programming Systems and Languages," is always called "Scheme.")
Posted by on 7 February 2003 at 2:16 AM
Comments
I had a (bad?) idea once that would complicate the numbering even further. Each course would be assigned two numbers (p, q). The number p would be a prime number, unique to that course. The number q would be a composite number whose factors were the prequisites for that course. So by knowing the number of the course (p, q) you immediately knew what it's prereqs were, assuming you, like the eleet, could factor large numbers quickly.
Posted by rkc on 11 February 2003 - 11:05 PM