I would never disagree. I am just disagreeing with David who seems to be at the position that academia is useless and PhDs are unable to do anything useful (he really seems to hate PhD people - it seems to be a personal thing, so no discussion needed).
Markus On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 6:07 PM, Shannon <[email protected]> wrote: > On Oct 12, 2011, at 4:14 PM, Markus Pilman wrote: > > Without academics there wouldn't be computer science. > > True, but to be fair, shouldn't we declare it a team effort? In the '50's, > computer science did not exist officially at the science-intensive > institution of MIT--academics in the math department warned people to stay > away from computers--most people considered the thought that computers > themselves could actually be a field of study to be ridiculous. The > unofficial slogan of the math department was, "There's no such thing as > Computer Science--it's witchcraft." Without Kotok, Gosper, Samson, > Deutsch--non-academic hackers--McCarthy would not have formed the first CS > course at MIT. The hackers weren't PhDs, but they shared motivations with > the academics: To advance the field in order to make contributions to > humanity. I've been reading Steven Levy's "Hackers"…. _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk
