[racket] "The Disadvantages of High School Programming"

--- On Fri, 6/11/10, Raoul Duke <raould at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 3:22 PM, Joe
> Marshall <jmarshall at alum.mit.edu>
> wrote:
> > That's the problem.  Maybe it shouldn't be the case.
>  Variations on this
> > statement are alarming:
> >
> > ``It's quite possible to be a productive and
> successful physician
> > without having a
> > solid understanding of medicine.''
> 
> i work in the video game world, so i see another side to
> this: It is
> quite possible for an artist to be productive and
> successful without
> having a solid understanding of material science.

That's not really a very good analogy; it is similar to saying, "It is quite possible to be a productive and successful writer without having a solid understanding of botany."  The problem is that there is no clear relation between understanding material[s] science and being an artist, whereas there is a clear relation between understanding computer science (at least insofar as it concerns such related topics as data structures, algorithms, discrete mathematics, and the like) and writing robust programs.

Granted, computer science != programming, and it is entirely possible to study topics in computer science in such a manner that they are orthogonal to programming.  However, the link between related topics in computer science and robust programming seems to be much closer than that between materials science and being an artist.

-- Benjamin L. Russell