Breaking backwards compatiblity

[James Miller]

On 12 March 2012 15:42, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 03:32:39PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> [...]
>> I'm convinced that colleges in general produce very bad programmers.
>> The good programmers who have degrees, for the most part (I'm sure
>> there are rare exceptions), are the ones who learned on their own, not
>> in a classroom.  It's sad that society brainwashes people into
>> believing the opposite.
> [...]
>
> I have a master's degree in computer science. About 90% (perhaps 95%) of
> what I do at my day job is stuff I learned on my own outside the
> classroom. That is not to say the classroom is completely worthless,
> mind you; courses like discrete maths and programming logic did train me
> to think logically and rigorously, an indispensible requirement in the
> field.
>
> However, I also found that most big-name colleges are geared toward
> producing researchers rather than programmers in the industry. Now I
> don't know if this applies in general, but the curriculum I was in was
> so geared towards CS research rather than doing real industry work
> (i.e., write actual programs!) that we spent more time studying
> uncomputable problems than computable ones.
>
> OK, so knowing what isn't computable is important so that you don't
> waste time trying to solve the halting problem, for example. But when
> *most* (all?) of your time is spent contemplating the uncomputable,
> wouldn't you say that you're a bit too high up in that ivory tower? I
> mean, this is *computer science*, not *uncomputable science* we're
> talking about.
>
> Case in point. One of the courses I took as a grad student was taught by
> none less than Professor Cook himself (y'know the guy behind Cook's
> Theorem). He was a pretty cool guy, and I respect him for what he does.
> But the course material was... I don't remember what the official course
> title was, but we spent the entire term proving stuff about proofs.  Let
> me say that again.  I'm not just talking about spending the entire
> semester proving math theorems (which is already questionable enough in
> a course that's listed as a *computer science* course). I'm talking
> about spending the entire semester proving things *about* math proofs.
> IOW, we were dealing with *meta-proofs*.  And most of the "proofs" we
> proved things about involved *proofs of infinite length*.
>
> Yeah.
>
> I spent the entire course repeatedly wondering if I had misread the
> course calendar and gone to the wrong class, and, when I had ruled that
> out, what any of this meta-proof stuff had to do with programming.
>
>
> T
>
> --
> Recently, our IT department hired a bug-fix engineer. He used to work
> for Volkswagen.

I'm entirely self-taught, and currently taking a break from university
(too much debt, not enough time, too much stress). I rarely use stuff
that I haven't taught myself. I realize now that trying to teach
people how to program is very, very hard however, since I always think
about how to teach stuff I know. Ideally you'd learn everything at
once and spend the next 2 years re-arranging it in your brain, but
unfortunately people don't work like that...

--
James Miller