[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:30:44 +0300
"Geoffrey S. Mendelson" <gsm at mendelson.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 01:13:57PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> > I don't know that it's EVER been about "broad concepts".  Today it's
> > Word and Excel and PowerPoint.  15 years ago it was Wordperfect,
> > Lotus 1-2-3, and DBase.
> 
> When my wife went to school to get a Master's in Library Science,
> circa mid 1980's, she took a programing course in PL/I. By the
> late 1980's the same school had replaced it with a computer course that
> included producing a WordPerfect document, a Lotus spreadsheet and
> a Dbase  database.

What's happening is we moved from learning to solve problems by creating
tools, to solving them by picking packaged solutions.

Nothing wrong with packaged solutions, I use them all the time, but first I
learned to do it myself.

> Luckily the school stopped their MLS program before it became Google and
> the Wikipedia. :-(

Indeed.

Doesn't anyone see down the road, when these things will need to be
maintained, and no one will be able to do it?  Don't they know that if Google
dies, you can't use Google to fix itself?

Bootstrapping... we are losing the knowledge of how to do that.

Aside:

I've spent years working jobs using scripting languages, HTML, etc.  I hated
it, but for some time it has been the only work I could find.

It absolutely rots your brain.

Two weeks ago I started writing low level C code just to being repairing the
damage.  Nothing magic about C, I just mean I'm starting back at the
beginning, creating tools for the layers above.  No one seems interested in
this kind of programmer any more, but I think it is important to keep up with
it anyway, and I really think it should be used more.

It scares me that you can graduate now with a comp-sci degree, without ever
having done any system programming.

It's one thing to perodically retrain yourself to correct a problem like I'm
doing, but what do you do when you never learned in the first place?


-- 
shannon          | If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
                 |         -- Mark Twain