Re: Also Leaving MidRange Equipment

Joe Pluta wrote:

> My fear is that they're not teaching programming in college anymore.  If
> CS101 starts off with Visual Basic and .NET, then you're missing a whole
> bunch of stuff you need, like basic math, basic logic, basic algorithms
> and basic DB design.

No shit there.

I took two years of high school programming on the district's student
timeshare system, an IBM 370/135, running McGill University's MUSIC
operating system. Then I went directly into California State University,
Long Beach, where I spent 5 years getting a Bachelor of Science. I could
have spent two years at a local junior college, where they had another
MUSIC system, but I chose to go directly into CSULB, specifically
BECAUSE the mainframes there were radically different (various CDC
Cybers and a DEC PDP 11/70). I wanted to learn a wide variety of
programming languages, on a wide variety of systems, and ended up, in
addition to the 11/70 and various Cybers, using a first-generation
IBM-PC for a gamewriting class (I was mightily surprised that something
with the IBM logo on the front didn't use EBCDIC!), my own Radio Shack
TRS-80 Model I for a directed study in which I wrote a text editor
(based on what I was still used to from high school), and (since I
detested CDC Fortran) various combinations of my old high school system
and my Mod I for different projects in Numerical Analysis.

I walked away from my commencement knowing BASIC, FORTRAN, Pascal,
COBOL, PL/I, Lisp, and PDP-11 Assembler. Then it took me nearly three
years to find a job that was even partly a programming job, and that
first job drove me to the brink of insanity in only two years. Then I
spent over 4 years looking for a REAL programming job.

I scoffed at those in my graduating class who chose to overspecialize.
And yet the most overspecialized 1985 CSULB graduates were almost as
generalized as I was, compared to this latest crop of yahoos who walk
away from the university without ever having worked with anything bigger
than a mini-tower PC, and who are either Microsloth specialists, or Java
specialists, to the exclusion of all else.

A university is a place where there are many fountains of knowledge.
Unfortunately, many of todays students will only drink from a few, and
only a few tiny sips from even those.

As Dorothy Parker said, when asked to use "horticuture" in a sentence,
  "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."

-- 
James H. H. Lampert
Professional Dilettante
http://www.hb.quik.com/jamesl
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