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From: ebh@bentley.UUCP (Ed Horch)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: What theory do YOU use?
Message-ID: <614@bentley.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 6-Mar-86 18:02:17 EST
Article-I.D.: bentley.614
Posted: Thu Mar  6 18:02:17 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 8-Mar-86 13:16:01 EST
Distribution: na
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Liberty Corner
Lines: 37

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