Tangling "AS/400 Education" and "Design shift" threads

Never being one to be shy, I'll risk confusing issues :)

Let me preface this rather long missive by cheerfully admitting my
ignorance of what I speak - I attended a 4 year university.  As such,
views expressed re: community colleges and the like are based
wholly on prejudice, hearsay, and whatever other flimsy evidence
has floated my way.  Opinions expressed are in no way intended to
denigrate ANYONE on the list, nor any graduates of CC's, tech
schools, or even the schools of hard knocks.  Now, onward

I've followed with interest the "AS/400 Education" thread and seem to
notice a pattern in the responses.  There seem to indeed be some, if
not many, academic institutions which teach the AS/400, but the vast
majority of the responses seem to reference smaller local schools,
e.g. community colleges, small technical schools, etc.  All to the
good, in that more people are exposed to the box itself.

(insert most biased & uninformed opinion here) However, it seems to
me that 2 year schools, tech schools, and the like are focused on
teaching skills to assist students in getting a job, not necessarily on
"ivory tower" theories.  In the AS/400 I'd expect a very specific
curriculum (RPG, DDS, CL, maybe a little Ops), very focused on
what's prevalent & in use "out there" now. (end most biased &
uninformed opinion)  

Might this not have something to do with the "design shift" thread that's
been floating about as well?  If I'm correct, the schools out there
are either the school of hard knocks (where you learn what's
already been done) or schools specifically focusing on what's
already been done so you can get out & get a job quickly.  Hence,
new talent on the platform, such as it is, has never been exposed to
underlying technologies, the theories, the "blue sky" speculating that
leads to dramatic paradigm shifts like Rob Dixon's "neural network"
development tool.

Example: I was involved, once upon a time, in a data conversion
project.  The old system had some data stored in a floating point
format, which (to the best of my knowledge) isn't supported by RPG. 
The other techies, all "I learned by the seat of my pants" types, on
the project pronounced it DOA - we just can't read the input.  Having
taken courses in basic computer theory, I drew on long forgotten
lore of exponents and mantissa's in high order bits and whatnot and
wrote an RPG program that would convert binary floating point data
to zoned decimal.  It wasn't fun nor easy nor do I claim it was the
best solution - but the point is, since my education was not limited to
just the box I was working on nor to specific techniques in common
use on said system I was apparently better able to think "out of the
box" than my colleagues.

Upshot - maybe the thing to do is to push schools to teach "data
processing" rather than exclusively the AS/400 itself.  By that, I
mean go ahead & study Codd and relational database theory, study
the ins and outs & guts of what's deep down inside as well as the blue
sky but not very practical theories along with the nuts and bolts of
the AS/400.  One of the things that impresses me most about the
AS/400 is the ease with which it handles doing something I know to be
technically difficult to do (single level storage for example),
primarily because some prof forced me to deal with the same issues
in Operating Systems 407 using "bear skins and stone knives"...well,
systems other than the AS/400, which amounts to the same thing :).  If
there were more of that type of "Gee, what if I tried X" talent
working on the AS/400, design paradigm shifts might come about all
by themselves.  Maybe the ease of development on the AS/400
encourages a gradual "dumbing down" of the collective talent pool,
by which I do NOT mean a lack of intelligence, but more a lack of
imagination.

Preparing to be flamed by CC graduates, but still curious as to the
opinions out there

Scott Cornell
Mercy Information Systems
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