> Without a question (IMO) - the least interesting section of the bookstore > was the Computer area. Hundreds of how-tos on the commercial technologies > currently hot. The end. > > Nothing worth talking about that precedes the current hot technologies - one > would conclude from the book selection. > > Why would anyone spend $40,000 a year to study how-tos of technologies that > will be obsolete by the time they are 30 - if not before. > > Its not even in the running as something worth considering. > > I am no more an intellectual than I am a comedian. But give me a good > stand-up, or a facile, learned mind to try to follow and digest. > > Programming as an academic subject area is *way*, *way* off track - to the > extent my little browse of yesterday was indicative of anything - which I do > believe it was. > > Art
The economics section of my local big bookstore seems to be far more of a travesty than the technology section (which does have a number of "deeper" books that are only of interest to CS people --- the same copies are there *every* time I go). I think CS has many similarities to economics. Roughly, both CS and economics have a theory side, and an *extremely* practical applied side. In the extreme, theoreticians in both fields are embarassed by the "uneducated" practitioners, and the practitioners shake their head at the obvious irrelevance of so much theory. Theory and practice both influence each other in a feedback loop. And both fields have a love-hate relationship with mathematics. Do working economists ever take derivatives? Do working programmers ever use L'Hopital's rule to compare algorithm performance? Is it because practitioners dislike mathematics? Or is it that the mathematics isn't actually practical? I don't worry too much about the people who go into CS expecting vocational training --- such people can very happily be steered towards excellent technical training outside of universities. But I suspect that CS is often a let-down to students who expect it to be as relevant as, say, engineering or business --- especially if they take any AI courses. :-) Toby -- Dr. Toby Donaldson School of Computing Science Simon Fraser University (Surrey) _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig