On Wednesday, June 5, 2002, at 08:40 , Ovid wrote:
[..]
>
> First-rate mathematicians want to hang around
first-rate
> mathematicians. Second-rate mathematicians want
to hang
> around third-rate mathematicians.
>
> The reason for that is left as an exercise for the
reader :)
So, ignoring for the moment drieux's eloquent case
for calling this a bogus distinction (if I understood
what he said, which isn't always easy), if we assume
for the sake of argument that a newbie is a third-rate
Perl programmer (although granted s/he may be first
rate in another pond), what does that make you
experienced people hanging around with us? :-)
[Besides wonderful and nice people, of course?]
And then drieux said:
> But what if 12 years in the industry helped me
better understand how
> frighteningly silly that Degree in Computer Science
really was to begin
> with?
Au contraire. I know it is fashionable to wonder
what all that education was good for, but after about
10 years myself, I find that I have repeatedly been
able to pick up new languages and packages at a faster
rate than many of my peers in the corporate IT world,
and I credit the value of the more conceptually
abstract 4-year CS degree as compared to the very
concrete and limited 2-year business programming
degree of some of my colleagues. Having learned
abstractly about algorithms, operating system
internals, compilers, and so on may not be something I
use everyday (not to even mention functional
programming and CS theory, much of which I've no doubt
forgotten), but it's given me a higher framework in
which to categorize and relate new knowledge, which is
what learning is all about. The tradeoff is that I
actually graduated knowing nothing about how to use
any particular commercial databases, for instance, but
I knew about tree structures and hash tables, and once
you know the concepts and theory, it's easy to pick up
specific commercial implementations.
But then, I never went to grad school or into
academia, so perhaps I'm really just one of the
middle-tier people myself! :-)
> Or would this be the wrong place to propose that if
only Larry Wall
> had been a team player and been willing to do what
needed to be done
> to make things in sed/awk more ellegant - and be a
'real first water'
> programmer rather than someone out to impress the
3rd tier wankers...
>
> But the same would also apply to the fact that those
CERN wankers
> really should have been content with telnet and ftp
- since clearly
> this whole skank with the lame, lame, lame HTTP
protocol was merely
> there because those were so clearly lame types who
were never going
> to be 'real programmers'..
Hey, for that matter, what was so wrong with assembly
language? ;-)
- John
=====
"Now it's over, I'm dead, and I haven't done anything that I want; or, I'm still
alive, and there's nothing I want to do." - They Might Be Giants, http://www.tmbg.com
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
