On Sun, 14 Oct 2001, Lorin wrote: > Sometimes i wonder what i'm missing by never having gone to college... > This convention is innundated by the attitude that theoretical work is > where it's at, and anyone that actually builds anything is so lame as to > be beneath contempt. About the lowest anyone is willing to admit to > stooping is developing prototype frameworks to demonstrate their > OO design principles of
That is unfortunately a very common attitude. It's quite amusing to see such people eat a slice of humble pie when they actually try to make a product ship. I'm quite well-versed in computer science theory despite being a dropout. Academics get really flustered when you argue in favor of hacker-style coding and they can't just pull intellectual rank in response. > I wonder if that's how i would have turned out if i had gone to college. > Would i be Lorin Kobashigawa-Bates renouned pot-bellied, pasty-faced, > pretentiously poorly-dressed, moustached computer super-ego? It's > certainly how i was raised. I was much the same way - everyone expected me to go through college, then grad school, then get an academic position somewhere, but my temperament just wasn't suited for it (read: I'd have chewed my arm off getting out of that trap.) I don't regret dropping out of college at all. It seems to be a common phenomenon these days. Practical experience has gotten me a completely different perspective. I just spent several hours poking around citeseer finding papers on a particular problem, and came up with a number of brilliant, fascinating papers which took many very smart people several years to come up with, and every last one of them says things in the intro which make me cringe. They completely miss the practical implications of their work which are, to me, completely obvious. -Bram Cohen
