Breaking backwards compatiblity

[Nick Sabalausky]

"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message 
news:mailman.510.1331520028.4860.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>
> That is not to say the classroom is completely worthless,
> mind you;

I'd say that, and I often have ;) And I forever will.

> courses like discrete maths

Personally, I found discrete math to be the easiest class I took since 
kindergarten (*Both* of the times they made me take discrete math. Ugh. God 
that got boring.) It was almost entirely the sorts of things that any 
average coder already understands intuitively. Like DeMorgan's: I hadn't 
known the name "DeMorgan", but just from growing up writing "if" statements 
I had already grokked how it worked and how to use it. No doubt in my mind 
that *all* of us here have grokked it (even any of us who might not know it 
by name) *and* many of the coworkers I've had who I'd normally classify as 
"incompetent VB-loving imbiciles". Then there was Pidgeonhole principle, 
which was basically just obvious corollaries to preschool-level spacial 
relations. Etc. All pretty much BASIC-level stuff.

> 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.

The colleges I've seen seemed to have an identity crisis in that regard: 
Sometimes they acted like their role was teaching theory, sometimes they 
acted like their role was job training/placement, and all the time they were 
incompetent at both.

> 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.
>
>

I once made the mistake of signing up for a class that claimed to be part of 
the CS department and was titled "Optimization Techniques". I thought it was 
obvious what it was and that it would be a great class for me to take. 
Turned out to be a class that, realistically, belonged in the Math dept and 
had nothing to do with efficient software, even in theory. Wasn't even in 
the ballpark of Big-O, etc. It was linear algebra with large numbers of 
variables. I'm sure it would be great material for the right person, but it 
wasn't remotely what I expected given the name and department of the course. 
(Actually, similar thing with my High School class of "Business Law" - 
Turned out to have *nothing* to do with business whatsoever. Never 
understood why they didn't just call the class "Law" or "Civic Law".) Kinda 
felt "baited and switched" both times.