strangest systems I've sent email from

On Mon, 25 Apr 2016, Brian L. Stuart wrote: I get that. I know what you are getting at. It's basically an extension of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The idea is somewhat that if students learn a "good" language that'll teach them some meta-structure that will help them later. Conversely, I've heard folks say that BASIC is the opposite since the goto statement encourages bad-coding. I get that too. Then, let me say that the *idea* that I was attacking Pascal via Oberon rather than the Ivory Tower Academics is ridiculous. I completely understand the point you are making. I don't disagree. Since most folks are too broke to afford it without taking on massive debt, modern students might be forgiven if the distinction is lost on them after they emerge with huge debt saddling them. Your point might be logically valid, but ask a 23 year old if they care when they can't get a job after giving the uni a quarter million bucks and 4-5 years of time they spent being "educated" rather than "trained". The underlying point I was making is that schools don't always "train" a person ... and that's what I wanted and actually needed. There weren't any dedicated coding schools I had access to back then. So, my option was to attend a local school I could afford or nothing. Much to my chagrin all but one of the profs had turned off their brains in 1986 and it was the 90's. The only one of them who could actually teach *or* train me in anything was too busy managing a ranch (seriously) to spend much time teaching. The rest of them could barely grade my code. True. I wonder though, do you believe that teaching a language with almost zero commercial value is justified in the name of education because of it's superior "meta" qualities ? They couldn't have done both since all commercially successful languages are just so much trash ? IMHO, one can teach using just about any Turing-complete language (and yes I've taught programming classes myself, just not at a University). If the lang sucks then you can point out what sucks about it and what not to do. My first language was Logo. It'd have been a lot more helpful at the time if it was something else. I tossed Logo aside the minute I got a compiler. 99% of the useful design patterns are ones I've learned on my own. As Will Hunting says, I might have paid $1.50 in late fees to learn what they taught me in school and been a lot better off, but bereft of the sheepskin in the end. Then again, I went to two crappy schools that didn't specialize in CS. I didn't graduate. I dropped out in my 4th year after the frustration boiled over. So, maybe my personal perspective is just as personal as those folks who went to MIT and fell in love with LISP, just different (about $250,000 different, in fact). Grades aren't meaningless if you have a grant/scholarship to maintain or need to get into graduate school. They aren't meaningless if you have to pay tuition and ever class you have to re-take costs you $$$. They have plenty of meaning to employers like IBM who might not hire you for that entry-level position with a low GPA. They might not reflect some aspect of education or learning you think is important, but there is more to going to uni than just to get a mind expanding education. I think folks who haven't been to school in 20+ years have a totally warped view of what is happening nowadays. They are becoming astronomically expensive and the value they impart is more and more questionable. The debt trap they participate in is good enough reason for many students to avoid them altogether and seriously consider "training" style schools as alternative if you'd like to say, be able get a job via passing a technical interview when you graduate. I was coding at a job about six years ago and we wanted to hire a couple of interns. So, we interviewed about 6 candidates. All our code was in C or C++ and we found that none of the students from the local universities had those skills. They were taught (some) Smalltalk and (mostly) Java. Okay, fine, but the ones I interviewed had very weak critical thinking skills, and that was the worst part since I could have grudglingly taken the time to teach them C or C++. I could only attribute that to the memorize-and-regurgitate culture of the schools, but maybe it was just bad luck. We ended up hiring a 17 year old kid with GED who made the college grads look downright pathetic. He was self-taught on cheap home computers. He knew a few scripting languages we didn't care about but we taught him C and C++ and he was doing commits about three weeks later. Later on we hired one of the interns and had to let them go because he didn't understand that he couldn't skip work like he skipped class and also couldn't think or code his way out of a wet paper sack. If I remain dubious of the value of "education" vs "training", just chalk it up to my personal experience. -Swift