Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!agate!web4d.berkeley.edu!laba-4an
From: laba-4an@web4d.berkeley.edu (Andy McFadden)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: School...
Message-ID: <8404@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 6 Apr 88 16:25:04 GMT
References: <8803281912.aa01446@SMOKE.BRL.ARPA> <8652@reed.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: laba-4an@web4d.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Andy McFadden)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 46

In article <8652@reed.UUCP> kamath@reed.UUCP (Sean Kamath) writes:
>In article <8803281912.aa01446@SMOKE.BRL.ARPA> MCL9337@TAMVENUS.BITNET writes:
>> [a discussion on the usefullness of school]
>>
>> The best you get is a wimpy BASIC course or something.  I had to
>>take a BASIC course my Senior year in high school.  It was a big laugh!  I had
>>taught myself BASIC two years before that!  I learned ABSOLUTELY NOTHING from
>>that class.

That's why teachers are human.  If you had asked, they probably would have
let you do something more creative with your time (I got to play with a Mac
during an introductory computer course that was bundled with driver's ed :-) ).

>>School (not including college) can not come close to teaching you anything
>>about the more complicated aspects of computing!
>
>Not even in college, for the most part.  For a short time, I was going
>around yapping about how silly it was to be a CS major.  I also had my
>reasons, but. . .  Well.  Let me say, I've had three classes in computing
>(languages.  None is "use".), one when I was in 8th grade, one in 10th, and
>the last in 12th.  I am now a "senior" in college, and have done quite well
>all by myself, in that I can get a good job programming in C (the classes I
>took were in BASIC and assembler).  So what is school for?

Let's put this into perspective.

I can't speak for everyone, but I learned Pascal in high school, Scheme
(a dialect of Lisp) my first semester of College (cs60a), and C and VAX
assembler the second (cs60b).  Data structures and algorithms for their
manipulation come in the third part (cs60c).

This is the first year and a half of college.  Unless you graduate early,
their are two and a half more years... everything from interfacing hardware
and software to VLSI design (sneaking into grad classes has been done before).

Let us not thumb our noses at the entire educational system just because some
schools aren't prepared to teach a good programming course.

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-- 
"lisp" (n) - Acronym for Lots of Irritating Single Parenthesis.