> > Do you recall a talk Alan gave some years back at Stanford? He was on a good > rant about how our computer science/engineering departments had let > themselves be turned into Java certification mills, and ultimately uttered > the words "what has happened to the mighty Standford?" I was a little > surprised at his candor (took guts) and agreed with every word he said. >
Here is a reference to an interview Alan did with ACM where he mentions Java vocational training: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 " AK Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over. I realized that anytime I want to know what I’m doing, I can just write down the kernel of this thing in a half page and it’s not going to lose any power. In fact, it’s going to gain power by being able to reenter itself much more readily than most systems done the other way can possibly do. All of these ideas could be part of both software engineering and computer science, but I fear—as far as I can tell—that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification. " I think goodness that my first computer science professor tore two pages out of the LISP manual and drummed it into our thick skulls that the whole execution cycle was contained in APPLY and EVAL. I owe that guy a lot. Thanks, Eddie Storm. Larry
