Selfconscious or unselfconscious software design?

Abstract

Anyone who is involved in computer science education will be used to engaging in passionate debates over questions such as ‘What programming language should we be teaching’? Moreover, if these debates take place in front of colleagues from other disciplines, for example when joint schemes are being developed, then concern is often expressed about the inability of computer scientists to come to any generally accepted conclusions.

In this paper the view is proposed that the key questions of computer science education are really manifestations of a much deeper issue in computing which has been alluded to in various publications, but never discussed to a generally accepted conclusion by the computer science community at large.