gill (08/19/82)
I am very interested in hearing more about what is going on at Stevens. As Larry mentioned, there is considerable discussion at MIT about the pros and cons of undergradutate (and personal) hacking. Although I think that 6.035 (Computer Langauge Engineering) at MIT was best without a compiler writing lab, there are many other courses which would benifit from vastly increased undergraduate computer resources. The computer gap is actually widest not in the Computer Sciences, but in the other Engineering disciplines, where many design methods have come to *depend* on computer modeling. It is becoming ever harder to teach these in the classroom while giving problem sets to students with only HP calculators at their disposal. There is also the problem of forcing students to become dedicated to some professor's research project in order to get machine time to hack their own ideas. Though giving every student a PC might be the answer, we also would like to discourage students from going off into dark corners to hack while closing their eyes to their vast knowledge available from their predecessors (i.e. the faculty). It is a very hard question. I am very much embroiled in such discussions at MIT and would appreciate any opinions and/or pointers to other schools facing the same problem. Thanx, Gill Pratt ...alice!gill OR gill@mit-mc p.s. To those of you who are thinking of chosing a college for you (or heaven forbid, your childeren) to go to, try to fight the urge to cling to the familier. Ataris and Apples are nice toys. But if you're going to college to hack micros, you're wasting your money. This isn't to put down schools which advertise their PCs in the glossy pamphlet; PC's are very attractive features. What they aren't, however, is the back-bone of one's education. What makes places like MIT, Stanford, CMU, UCB, etc... great is that they really teach computer *science*, not computer hacking. Though hacking may re-inforce what you are taught and yield new understanding to otherwise purely theoretical problems, it is only a catalyst to learning, not a substitute for the basic material. This isn't to say that the undergraduate at MIT don't hack. They do (and how!). The difference is that they learn and accomplish quite a bit more for their effort than the average BYTE-reading hobbiest.