ebh@bentley.UUCP (Ed Horch) (03/07/86)
There has been some discussion of late that boils down to, "OK, you're knee-deep in degrees, but how much of it do you USE?" Like I said in my previous posting, I have just two years of college. I have learned exactly two things in college that I have used in the real world: The first is DeMorgan's Laws. But I didn't learn them in a CS course, I learned them in a logic design course I took from the EE department. I've used these laws, and Karnaugh maps, and all that other gate-and-flip-flop stuff many times to unravel some absolutely horrendous if-else-if-if-else-if-not-etc logic (most of which was located in existing code that I had to enhance or maintain). Ironically, the course did not count towards my major, only as elective credit. :-( The other thing I learned was really more like putting real names on concepts I already understood. In this case it was the dis- tinction between deterministic and nondeterministic automata. This was learned in a class called "discrete structures," taught by a grad student that didn't give A's. It was the only challenging computer class I ever took. I'd gladly take a C- or worse in every class if every class was that challenging and productive. Nothing that neat ever happened again, so I quit and went to work. Since then (four years ago), there have been many cases of some knee-deep-in-degrees type that would say something like, "Well, if you just implement a Maxewll-Lempel-Babbage-quid-pro-quo..." I reply, "You do that in my house, you'll clean it up!" He replies, "I mean a linked list." Oh. -Ed Horch
colonel@ellie.UUCP (Col. G. L. Sicherman) (03/12/86)
I've got a better example. Somebody taught Eric Allman about LALR parsers,
and he went out and invented SENDMAIL! We're lucky nobody taught him about
Petri nets....
"Captain Buffalo! Look out for that truck loaded with DYNAMITE!"
--
Col. G. L. Sicherman
UU: ...{rocksvax|decvax}!sunybcs!colonel
CS: colonel@buffalo-cs
BI: csdsicher@sunyabva