Let Go, Standard Library From Community

[Bill Baxter]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Chris Nicholson-Sauls wrote:
>> I tend to tell people that all forms of art seemingly arise from some 
>> form of science. Programming just happens to be an artform still 
>> closely linked to its base science.  And our own Walter -- if I recall 
>> right -- is a prime example of a major developer whose background is 
>> in something else.  I'm pretty sure those airplanes didn't require new 
>> compilers.
> 
> My training is as a mechanical engineer, with an emphasis on jet 
> engines. I was fortunate enough to attend a university (Caltech) that 
> thoroughly believed that all their sci/eng majors should be well 
> grounded in a broad range of fields, and as I've gotten older and wiser 
> I see the value in it now.
> 
> Caltech requires of all its graduates:
> 
> o    3 years of calculus
> o    2 years physics
> o    1 year chemistry
> 
> among other courses.

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'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.

--bb