David, A very interesting observation.
Perhaps the sort of skill that a "computer person" should have is to know that any logic can be built on a NAND. This particular "factlet" enabled me to construct some rather fancy logic in the old NetView command list language, the one that most people were happy to ditch in favour of REXX. However, REXX doesn't have the multiple substitution feature - or not elegantly - that the old NetView command list language has and that, together with NAND logic, was what I needed essentially to bypass excessive "grammar" and verbosity in building commands. Moral: a highly academic - although practical for electronic engineers - topic lead to employment in a practical computing solution. It was looking though the referenced MIT course list that reminded me of this Chris Mason ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Andrews" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main To: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, 29 June, 2006 4:12 PM Subject: Re: Curiosity > On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 17:09 -0500, Tom Harper wrote: > > I've seen very few university-level computer science programs that are > > effective, either for mainframes or non-mainframes. > > This conversation shouldn't wander too far OT, but I've never understood > why people believe that computer science departments should teach m/f > particulars (or for that matter, MS-Windows particulars). > > If "computer science" deserves the "science" part of its title, then > those departments should be teaching algorithms, graph theory, game > theory, optimization, numerical analysis, NNs, functional programming, > compiler structure, objects -- stuff like that. NOT windowing APIs, not > JCL, not Apache modules, not Visual Anything. The platform used by the > students should be treated as incidental. > > I'll hire a kid with a fresh CS degree any day, whether he's got MVS > experience or not. There's some COBOL coder-beavers around here with > years of MVS behind them, but have no idea what O(n) means, and they > produce some truly wretched code. > > Really, you want graduates with MVS skills? Talk to vocational schools > (or to Steve) -- THEY're in the business of teaching platforms. > Computer science departments should stick to computer science. > > Here's MIT's EECS course catalog. Notice you don't see either MVS -or- > Windows mentioned in it. > http://student.mit.edu/catalog/m6a.html > > -- > David Andrews > A. Duda and Sons, Inc. > [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
