gwyn@BRL.MIL (10/15/89)
In article <40101@bu-cs.BU.EDU>, madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost) writes: > This is just another lesson in history: you can be more effective if > you know of the successes and failures of your predecessors, but you > can get the same job done that they did without knowledge of them -- I disagree. The majority of inventions haven't occurred yet. Ignorance of what HAS been figured out is a severe handicap, and it is by no means certain that any given person will be able to recreate the discoveries, even if he had the time and other resources to do so. Yes, you can quite nicely code business applications in COBOL, devise data compression algorithms for sequential machines, and many other tasks without having a solid foundation of knowledge across the field of computer science. But if you're so self-limited in your abilities, you shouldn't advertise yourself as a computer-science generalist.
gwyn@BRL.MIL (10/15/89)
In article <1218@skye.ed.ac.uk>, richard@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) writes: > In article <11239@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes: > >The point is, if you don't know who Backus, Dijkstra, Hoare, Knuth, > >Thompson, Wirth, etc. are and what their major accomplishments were, > >you shouldn't advertise yourself as a professional computer scientist. > You certainly shouldn't call yourself a computer scientist if you don't > understand the major principles expounded by these people, but to > believe that knowledge of the people is important smacks of episodism. I was assuming that familiarity with the ideas would best be acquired by reading the original writings, or that if secondary sources were used at least they would have given proper credit to the originators of the ideas. Personally I find original sources to usually be much clearer and more inspiring than rehashes found in textbooks. I think professionalism is more a matter of attitude than anything else. I read what these men had to say, without any school prompting me (in fact, there was no discipline called "computer science" when I started to study it). That's because these were interesting and important ideas, and as a professional I care about ideas.