Re: gEDA-dev: Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit

[al davis <ad151-at-NOSPAMfreeelectron_dot_net>]

On Monday 08 October 2007, Stephen Williams wrote:
>  I think we are particularly
> keen on this as we in gEDA feel there is a dumbing down of
> the CS/EE curriculum by the big tool vendors.

It's tempting to think of the "big tool vendors" in our case as 
Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor.  They are not the problem.

Well ... they might be a little because some professors insist 
on teaching it even though it is way to hard to use for 
beginners.

The biggest dumbing down is by accepting the MS-windoze way of 
doing things, which you can do on any system.  Typing a command 
is completely foreign, even if the command is only two letters.  

Another part of problem in our case is the demo-ware that comes 
with the texts.  The "free" (meaning non-free) versions of 
Spice make me boil over.

From an educational viewpoint, they offer nothing that the true 
free version of Spice doesn't offer.  Worse, they take a lot 
away, and they are very hard to learn, very time consuming to 
teach.  It is nearly impossible to go beyond the magic black 
box level.

Gnucap offers some real advantages from an educational 
viewpoint.  It is interactive, lets you play with the circuit, 
and shows stuff that Spice doesn't.  I can teach enough of it 
to get started in a lot less class time than is required for 
Spice or a GUI-Spice.



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