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From: gds@spam.istc.sri.com (Greg Skinner)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.software-eng,comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: "Expertise"
Message-ID: <18764@joyce.istc.sri.com>
Date: 3 Apr 89 23:42:10 GMT
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Reply-To: gds@spam.istc.sri.com (Greg Skinner)
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(Followups to comp.edu, please)

>>... but the top twenty "thinks-he's-a-computer-scientist"
>>bozos that I have met were all C.S. Professors.  And the rest were
>>postgrads. Most of them just haven't had enough experiece building and
>>maintaining computers and software to know beans about it. They're all
>>frustrated mathematicians, and would rather to play with pencils
>>and paper than with silicon.
>>
>>I had plenty of company, I can assure you!  A visiting lecturer from
>>Oxford, whose name you probably would know, once told me that he hadn't
>>"programmed in anger" in over three years! He was quite proud of it.
>>He was busy coauthoring some of the most worthless theoretical pabulum
>>imaginable all written in a pidgin computer language.
>> (rest of harangue deleted)

This reminds me of a "discussion" (euphemism for argument, actually)
that I had with a friend of mine who does operations research.  Most
of her family are doing some sort of OR or applied math.  I asked her
how her family got so interested in applied math and OR, as opposed to
pure math, and she told me that pure math was "hokey".  She then went
on to tell me that much of pure math (and for that matter, pure
science) was useless, because many of the theorems and theories
believed to be true were later disproved, and the results were too
complicated to make any good use of, anyway.  (I believe she is
referring to parts of real analysis and queueing theory, some subjects
she struggled through.)  She then went on to say that except for a
select group of people (those people who "do good proofs"), everyone
else should stop trying to prove things and "just use the results from
the good proofs to apply them to solve the problems of the world."

Two problems I saw in this argument.  (1) it implies that a "bad"
proof is useless and should not exist, and (2) only certain people
should be allowed to do proofs, because they will always come up with
"good" ones.

>  I'm sorry but I just can't let this slip.  As a graduate of North Carolina
>  State University in Computer Science, I can say that I didn't do well
>  in school and that experience is worth everything.  But the one thing I
>  studied (and hard) were the theoretical courses.  Because if you know theory
>  you know it!

I won't claim that a knowledge of CS theory (or any other theory, for
that matter) conveys upon the student a total understanding of the
subject, but I believe a good understanding of theory is as important
as a good understanding of the applications.  Also, for me at least,
CS theory is interesting to think about.  Before I took my first
theory class, I never thought that there were classes of solvable
problems, or for that matter limits to computation.  And I also
struggled (and for that matter, am struggling ;-)) through parts of CS
theory. (Hi, email pals.)  I still find it fascinating, despite its
difficulty.

I think it is unfortunate that people become bitter and unhappy
because they cannot get good grades in subjects, because that takes
away from them any possible enjoyment of the subject for its own
merits.  I wish a lot of the competitive aspect of college would go
away, so we could all sit back and enjoy what we are learning without
worrying about grades.

--gregbo