Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!LOYVAX.BITNET!PGOETZ
From: PGOETZ@LOYVAX.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: School flame
Message-ID: <8804211830.aa02380@SMOKE.BRL.ARPA>
Date: 21 Apr 88 20:54:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 60

>Re: "Granted these courses are enough for some, but not for the best."
>No way.

Flame On!

>Here are a few trivial things...
>1. Assembly language with true parameter passing & recursion
  So why did you wait for a class to learn this? That's your fault.
And I'll bet they didn't teach you to read a program from a hex or binary dump.

>2. How to write a compiler
  I've written a compiler and an interpreter on my own.

>3. How to prove that a program will terminate; how to prove it is correct.
  But Turing proved that it's impossible to prove that a program will not
terminate. So it's not useful.
  Besides, nobody applies proofs to real programs. I took that course, too.
Saying we can verify programs is like saying SHRDLU proved that computers
understand English: it dealt with a toy world. You could in theory verify a
large program, but nobody would have the patience to write it. I'll believe
it when I see it.

>1. How to write timing-critical code like RWTS
  If you cracked programs & got into DOS seriously, you would know how.

>2. How to write an operating system
  Our OpSys prof refused to let me take OpSys as a freshman, even though I was
writing the operating system for the Gemini robot at the time. What a jerk.

  I made a long list of things I've done outside school.  Fortunately for you,
I deleted it.

  My primary sources are journals, magazines, books, and experimentation.
Classes are 1. paced to slow students, and 2. out of touch with reality.

  Language classes are useless. A language/hardware survey might be useful.
When you start a project, you should be able to choose the machine & the
language. Then you learn them.

  In 3 of 4 computer classes I've taken, the prof didn't grade your program on
whether it worked.  Rather, he graded it on how well it met his idea of a
well-written program.  Some people wrote non-functional, non-compilable programs
that got better grades than my bug-free, memory & CPU efficient ones.  Once I
was downgraded because I built error-correction into a program - "It wasn't in
the specs." Often I lost points for using non-approved commands (Gotos, deletes,
stack pops, etc.) Professors are all hung up on their own programming philosophy
("Globals are evil! Comment every line! Never break out of a loop! Always design
top-down/bottom-up/on data flow/on program flow/incrementally/fully!").

  The really useful classes are indepedent studies. Especially the ones where
you write a program in a language your counselor doesn't know - then he can
only criticize the program organization, data structures, & results.

  Comp sci classes offer only a fraction of what's out there. You are not
self-motivated, you are not a hacker, if you restrict yourself to classes.

Phil Goetz
PGOETZ@LOYVAX.bitnet

Disclaimer: If you are a Loyola comp sci professor, this is about all the
  Loyola comp sci professors except you.