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From: jamesth@microsoft.UUCP (James THIELE)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: The programming CULT
Message-ID: <56406@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 8 Aug 90 16:40:06 GMT
References: <1990Aug6.174543.27956@midway.uchicago.edu>
Reply-To: jamesth@microsoft.UUCP (James THIELE)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 35

In article <1990Aug6.174543.27956@midway.uchicago.edu> gft_robert@gsbacd.uchicago.edu writes:
>----- 
>In article <1990Aug6.172135.27287@midway.uchicago.edu>, I wrote:
|[...]
|>There are of course many academics who have led to the innovations we take for
|>granted today, but I personally admire someone like Bill Atkinson or Andy
|
|Just to clarify: I don't mean to put down anyone who has a BS or MS in CS; I
|feel certain that many of the people out there making cool new stuff for the
|Mac have gone this route.  Rather, I meant to express some skepticism of the
|value of theoretical academic study in the "real world".  Y'know, the kind of
|stufff PhD's study. :-> :->
|

I'm tired of this thread - you want to talk practical?  Look at compression
algorithms: the underlying theory/algorithms were worked out by PhD types.
Many error correcting codes can be viewed as sphere packing problems in
N-space, which is fairly theoretical.  I'm using bison/yacc/flex/lex on
a project right now and my CS language theory study certainly helps there.

Many self-taught programmers have big holes in their expertise and a lack
of perspective in their world view.  Knowing when to use the proper data
structure is more useful than knowing that a certain sequence of
instructions saves 2 machine cycles for some operation.  And having a breadth
of perspective has helped me in jobs as varied as VLSI CAD, commercial
airplane avionics, writing special purpose compilers and assemblers, and
microprocessor programming.

By the way, my background in CS helped me appreciate the Mac OS for the
excellent improvement that it is.  Nor should you all denigrate UNIX,
because for certain tasks it fits the job well, which is why I often
use the MPW shell which gives me most of the best of UNIX and Mac.

James Thiele -- microsoft!jamesth
Purdue, Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, '76