I think that we've drifted a little from the topic, which was more or less to get a feel for the people on this list and where they are in their education, not to get in a "university vs. self-teaching" argument. Personally I don't think it would be pragmatic for most Perlers out there to learn enough number theory to write their own hashing algorithm any more than a contractor needs to understand the chemical composition of the concrete he pours, and if you'll allow me to continue the analogy a bit further, it also doesn't mean that he can't buy the same textbooks and learn that information. I will admit that the level of dedication and self-sacrifice required is exceedingly rare, and I'm stretching the analogy pretty thin anyway, so I'll leave it there.
>-----Original Message----- >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tassilo von Parseval >Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 2:51 PM >To: drieux >Cc: Perl Perl >Subject: Re: The True Path to Learning Perl Re: [OT] Education Level The current set of perl-porters that are able and willing to work on the core are with not many exceptions people with academic degrees. There are others as well, but those are usually not responsible for the tricky bits that do require more than a little bit of self-teaching: you don't usually self-teach yourself enough number theory that is necessary for coming up with a sane hashing-algorithm or random number generator. A self-taught programmer will most definitely not be able to understand (let alone create) a regular expression engine. The things to be considered when crafting a memory allocater are usually beyond the things an autodidact has picked up. It's stuff that can be found in the old venerable computer-science text books that are recommended in academic circles. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
