On Dec 29, 2006, at 9:34 AM, Gonz wrote: >> Your logic is flawed. Being able to dream up interesting things is >> one thing. Being able to engineer and manufacture them is quite >> another. > > No, thats exactly what I meant. You don't need an engineering > degree to > "engineer" or design stuff. I meant dreamt up in a complete way, > including getting it to market. I remember working with some > programmers in the early 80's that were some of the best > programmers in > the business, and they learnt the domain knowledge they needed on the > fly, ... by reading....they did not have a formal education.
No one, certainly not me, ever said that having a "formal education" was essential to intelligence or knowledge. Those people were self- educated in their field of expertise. It become more difficult to do this as the knowledge required to understand the scope of a subject's complexity increases. I am one of those self-taught software engineers of the 1980s myself. My formal education had nothing to do with programming computers. I made a 20+ year successful career out of self-taught skills in programming and systems design. However, my education did teach me how to detect horsepucky when I heard it. Someone who boasts of their lack of education is stupid in my book, and to suggest that they have credible opinions about a complex subject when they demonstrate that they know little to nothing about research is horsepucky. G -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
