What Scala?

[Walter Bright]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> If there's one thing my 
> school experience taught me, it's that teachers are only interested in 
> focusing on the low-to-mid-range students.

That wasn't my college experience at all (Caltech). I was a 
low-to-mid-range student there, and the profs were always ready to help 
me, but I would get the impression they thought the material they were 
teaching was basic and they wanted more advanced students to they could 
teach the fun stuff instead.


> The advanced ones are only there 
> to shell out tuition money and act as cheap tutors.

That role was filled by grad students.


> They would be far better 
> off saving their time and money by not even going, but they almost *have* to 
> go anyway just because the rest of society (and HR drones in particular) are 
> brainwashed into thinking that there's a direct correlation between 
> academics and competence (if anything, it's slightly inverse - one of the 
> smartest people I know had so much trouble with school he ended up a high 
> school dropout). 

My 4 years at Caltech were transformative to me, particularly in my 
problem solving skills.

Certainly, you can be very successful without a university degree, but 
there can be a lot of value in a degree. It kinda also depends on how 
one goes about getting that degree. If one picked courses solely for the 
purpose of getting the degree, well, probably it won't be of much value 
in the end. I picked courses on the basis of thinking they'd be 
fundamental to the kind of career I wanted. The degree itself was not of 
much interest to me. It's forgotten in the bottom of a moldy box 
somewhere :-)