Re: Perl or Web Certifications?

["Jeff Jonas" <jeffj@panix.com>]

> > But I'm a practical guy and a lot of the college requirements
> > have proven mostly useless in my 20 year career.

> I'm saying this from the vantage point of a former professor
> of computer science. A college is not a vocational institution and
> much of what you learn is designed to teach you how to learn as
> apposed to what to learn. In addition, A college graduate is
> presumed to be a balanced individual.

I want to agree with you, but I feel like the cartoon character
with the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other,
each screaming at each other.

I agree with the "teach you how to learn" part.
Knowing how to adopt new technologies and respect their paradigms
is the flexibility and adaptability we're supposed to embrace
not just to endure college classes but jobs afterwards.
That's how I learned Perl: on the job, but with the
analysis and problem solving foundation I learned in school.
I swear that my hat size increased several sizes during the compiler class
as I had to grok grammers, LALR parsers, lexical analyzers,
finite state automata and other building blocks,
but that was an invaluable foundation for later assignments where I
inherited existing code and had to maintain various implementations of
a finite state machine!  In one job, I inherited
wonderfully debugged code that was a clean decomposition of the problem.
Had it been a physical machine, it would have been poetry in motion.
My challenge was to enhance it with new functions without making it ugly.
Respecting the existing code and methodology was facilitated
by being comfortable with what was done and how.
I could not have handled that so comfortably without the compiler class.
As I learned threads and multiprocessors on the job (we had no such things
when in college), the foundations I learned in college served me well.

But the "balanced individual" part is kinda debatable.
Like the old saying "you can lead a horse to water
but you can't force it to drink",
colleges have humanities and non-engineering requirements,
but are rarely really taken to heart.
My cumulative average was damaged by my final semester when
I dared to take hard, challenging classes, but I am a better person for it.
I took art classes that taught me things I'd have never have otherwise
experienced (meeting weekly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
If I were interested only in my average, I would not have taken the risk.

BUT ... in the September 2003 IEEE Spectrum, there's an article
"Stuff You Don't Learn in Engineering School" that laments lack of
ability to communicate with non-engineers via writing or verbally.
Sure, people are using the written medium via email, instant-messaging
and such, but as Truman Capote once said "That's not writing, that's typing."

Geez, life needs an "undo" button.
I lost the train of thought that brought that revelation upon me.
Perhaps it's the way I've edited and revised this reply
so many times already.  That's why I prefer the written medium.
It permits me to revise or even cancel the message with privacy!
I sympathise with folks who can't do that,
like the waiter who can't un-do the spilled soup!

> Practical (vocational) skills become obsolete whereas
> theory does not. The Kunth trilogy are the most quoted in the
> CS literature and they are 30 years old this year.

Agreed: my JCL and stupid-keypunch-tricks are rather useless now.
Experts in VAX/VMS are feeling kinda lonely.

As to foundation texts: certain fundamental truths are enduring.
I was just searching to cite the play/movie 1776 where Thomas Jefferson
says something like "I had hoped it would speak for itself" when asked
to defend his first draft of the Declaration of Independence
[which is a fine example of an enduring work].
I find myself using the dictionary MORE after school
(even without being graded on it!) since I want to
choose my words properly and express myself well.
Words that I've used for so long suddenly seem foreign
and I find new inner meanings or links as I explore further.
Taking joy in the written language and in self expression:
I don't believe that was really taught in school,
but perhaps some of the wonderful teachers I had planted the seeds of desire.
Like the bumper-sticker says "if you can read this, thank a teacher".
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