Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!quiroz
From: quiroz@cs.rochester.edu (Cesar Quiroz)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: RE: foreign langauage requirements
Message-ID: <1989Mar21.175437.29830@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 21 Mar 89 22:54:37 GMT
References: <1277@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Reply-To: quiroz@cs.rochester.edu (Cesar Quiroz)
Followup-To: sci.research
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Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY 14627
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In <1277@blake.acs.washington.edu>, robert@blake.acs.washington.edu (Gedankenleere) wrote:
| ...
| It is too easy find yourself being convinced that the actual state
| of affairs is just what you were prepared to believe to begin
| with. ...
| 
| ... And then, when you realize that very, very few scientific or
| mathematical professionals ACTUALLY use even a modicum of whatever
| feeble foreign languages they may have acquired in their previous
| trainings, and just HOW REALLY ILLITERATE THEY ARE IN THESE
| FOREIGN languages NOW, ...

ACTUALLY?  REALLY?  In the context of your impassioned plea for
carefully controlled scientific studies, I suppose you will be
willing to back up your uppercasing with a reference, right?

I side with you in one respect: more requirements are just so much
more overhead.  If you are serious (and classes don't get in your
way too often), you will likely find both motivation and time to
expand your horizons beyond your technical expertise.  That may take
you to study other languages, sure.  We can separate the two issues
(the original context was FLRs for PhD students):  1- Is learning
`many' languages useful to future PhDs?  2- Should this learning be
required?  My preference is for `yes' and `no'.

OOPS.  What is this doing in comp.arch anyway?  I am redirecting
follow-ups to sci.research, for lack of a better fit.

-- 
                                      Cesar Augusto Quiroz Gonzalez
                                      Department of Computer Science
                                      University of Rochester
                                      Rochester,  NY 14627