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From: matloff@witch.Berkeley.EDU (Norman Matloff)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: was: Don't look back. What about looking east?
Message-ID: <21885@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 22 Mar 89 02:54:54 GMT
References: <7287@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <2851@eos.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff)
Organization: EECS, UC Davis
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In article <2851@eos.UUCP> eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya) writes:

>Dave "Steve" Stevenson was just here.  We, including Norm Matloff,
>Daryl Long, and others have been talking about a foreign language requirement
>for CS majors.  What do you think, full sensory overload?  Too much?
>A PhD in math frequently requires 2 foreign languages (typically Russian
>and German), see what distinguishes academics from industry? 

>Learn some Japanese.

Eugene, you have a better memory than I do.  I don't remember saying
that, but since I do agree with the sentiment, I must have said it. :-)

2 languages is too much, but I think that 1 is quite reasonable.  Note
that reading CS in a foreign language is a lot harder than reading Math,
so that would be another reason to keep it down to only 1 language.

Eugene's points about our insularity are well-taken.  But I personally
am more concerned more about the quality of engineers the U.S. is
producing.  I know one person who is a well-regarded software engineer
in a prominent Silicon Valley firm who thinks that all machines have
the same machine language (no, this is NOT a joke).  That's an extreme
case, granted, but I do feel that there are a lot more of the weaker-level
people in the industry these days than there used to be, both in hardware
and systems software.  [No one who reads comp.arch is in this category,
of course. :-) ]

   Norm