Let Go, Standard Library From Community

[Walter Bright]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> If all you know is CS, then I think you're restricting the kind of work 
> you can do.  It's not too tough to figure out how to be a competent 
> programmer coming from a hard science or engineering discipline.  But 
> going the other way is pretty much impossible.  My tack was to take a 
> lot of CS courses, because they were fun and relatively easy, but go 
> with EE as the major.  It was much more difficult, but I'm glad I did it 
> that way.  The decent grounding in calculus, linear algebra, Fourier 
> analysis etc that I got from that has allowed me to do things I never 
> would have been able to consider had I just gotten the CS education.

I agree. When I worked at Boeing, it was in the early days of using 
computers for engineering analysis. There were problems because the 
programmers didn't understand engineering, and the engineers didn't 
understand programming. So there'd be programs that worked great but 
solved the wrong problem. My lead engineer wryly remarked once that I 
was the only one he'd worked with who brought back numbers from the 
computer that weren't garbage. (Things have changed a lot since then, my 
friends who work there tell me that everything is done on computers now.)

I've never seen anyone learn calculus outside of the classroom, but 
plenty of people who learned programming outside of one.

> I've heard that CS departments at schools these days are suffering from 
> a big drop in the number of majors.  But that seems to me to be as it 
> should be.  The IT boom brought on a lot of silliness.  You really don't 
> need a CS degree to do most IT jobs.  Yes, *everybody* needs to know how 
> work with computers these days to varying degrees.  Just like everyone 
> needs math to varying degrees.  But that doesn't mean there need to be a 
> lot of math majors, or CS majors.   Almost everyone takes a class or two 
> from the math department, but very few major in it.  Likewise, pretty 
> much everyone these days should have a class or two from the CS dept, 
> but we don't really need that many majors.

In defense of CS majors, Andrei has an academic CS background, and he's 
been a huge help in taking my limited back-of-envelope approach to the 
next level.

I once saw a news program on cheaters in universities. Students would 
shamelessly state on camera that they cheated whenever they could get 
away with it. I just find that stunning. Several would justify it with 
the claim that since they'll never use 97% of what they learn in 
college, there was no point in learning it, and therefore it was fine to 
cheat.

Just, wow. How pathetic and contemptible.

A friend of mine went through MIT, and he told me that after he was 
there for a while he had an epiphany. MIT wasn't teaching him things. 
MIT was teaching him how to think. And that's what the calculus, 
physics, etc., classes will give you. Sure it's hard, but that's what it 
takes to rewire your brain <g>.