Let Go, Standard Library From Community

[Dave]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Daniel Keep wrote:
>> This is one thing I really lament about my uni education thus far.  Two
>> topics that basically have *never* been covered in even minimal detail
>> have been optimisation and debugging.
> 
> Most great programmers didn't learn programming from taking college 
> courses. They learned it on their own. Programming has the nice 
> characteristic that it is fairly straightforward to learn on your own.
> 
> Want to take advantage of what a university can offer? Taking the basic 
> course in each of following will pay you lifelong dividends:
> 
> 1) Calculus
> 2) Accounting
> 3) Physics
> 4) Chemistry
> 5) Statistics
> 6) Electronics

I couldn't agree more. Software development is and always has been a craft(*) - part science, part 
art. Colleges have never been really good at teaching crafts -- no such thing as a "Bachelor of 
Crafts in Software Development" <g>

Personally, the best developers I've ever known (again, personally -- please note the next 
paragraph) have almost w/o exception been formally trained/educated for something else, and most of 
the CS majors went into management (but then again maybe they're truly the smart ones <g>).

That said, there are *alot* of super-smart CS students and graduates in this group, I gather. If 
it's truly what you love doing, a CS or related degree can only help because you get to goof-off for 
4 years doing what you like and learning too <G>

(*) Alan Cooper ("The Father of Visual Basic") for the insight that Software Development is really 
more of a craft than a science.