Education

Rejoined the ACM today, mostly for the online content; it's pretty damn good, actually. The trophy take away today was something by Bjarne Stroustup, creator of C++. Not sure of posting fulltext and/or excerpts from the ACM; I need to find out their use policy. Assuming no to the first, and yes to the latter.

""Education should prepare people to face new challenges; that's what makes education different from training."

Never really considered that before, but it's spot on the difference between vocational training and academics; the academics are usually more theoretical, which gives you a wider reach of what you *can* do, but less ability to sit down and immediately *do* anything, unless you've also self-trained on the side.

This came up in an argument against someone being incredulous that computer science degrees don't teach revision control systems, which lead me to think, well, should they? It's vocational, and not theory; it'd be like teaching an IDE. They're really useful skills in "real world" corporate jobs, but they're not computer science theory, by a longshot. They're the things you pick up along the way in college to get the college work done. Then again, having a school-sponsored revision control repository would have taken a lot of stress out of losing a floppy disk here or there.

It's always seemed that if you can find someone with background in theory who enjoys doing hands on work, you've won the recruiting game. That said, the background in theory doesn't have to be academic, and the hands-on-work doesn't have to be outside of academia, either. Thoughts?

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