Just yesterday he announced that he's quitting his Lisp dialect, computing in general, and Britain: http://groups.google.com/group/Qilang/browse_thread/thread/5...
Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
31–40 of 127 posts
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#32And here we have the reason why just about every single CS department in the US teaches Java instead of C or Scheme.
I'd rather see C taught than Scheme. Hardware matters, and a good CS-education should be centered in languages that recognize that. Software engineering, on the other hand is too important a subject to be left to the schools. Let them learn Scheme on their own. They'll appreciate it more that way.
C would be my first preference as well, but I also appreciate that Scheme (or another functional language) would provide better opportunities than C or Java for students to learn more "advanced" algorithmic techniques such as recursion.
The problem with Java (and C, to a lesser extent) in basic problem solving is that you can almost brute-force-code and get a working solution that will get full credit, but after writing it a more elegant (and efficient) solution isn't always obvious. In functional languages, that "more correct" solution almost always seems to stand out more, at least to me.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#33And here we have the reason why just about every single CS department in the US teaches Java instead of C or Scheme.
I'd rather see C taught than Scheme. Hardware matters, and a good CS-education should be centered in languages that recognize that. Software engineering, on the other hand is too important a subject to be left to the schools. Let them learn Scheme on their own. They'll appreciate it more that way.
They should learn both. Any CS student who does not understand simple hardware concepts such as page faults does not deserve a degree. Similarly, every CS student should learn functional and imperative programming. Period.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say that is an entirely accurate characterization. I don't know anyone in my department doing research that doesn't interest them. Students generally love the research they are doing and are probably a bit more autonomous than your comment seems to imply. I've taken both directions (industry then academia) and in industry I was a code-churning-out slave working on something that barely interested me. Now I…
Wouldn't you say that pursuing a startup is better than both industry and academia?
Not at all. Not a CS guy, but research was some of the most fun (and trying) times of my life. Figuring how things work, or how to make them work better is a ton of fun.
It's not for everyone, sure, but all scenarios have their pros and cons
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#35To be fair to the time, in 1999, there was the dot-com bubble going on and a lot of students were going into CS for the wrong reasons so there could have been more at play than government objectives. I suspect there were a lot of CS students who did not enjoy programming in such programs, thus accounting for seniors who couldn't do projects. I know CS and programming are not the same, but I liken it to studying Shake…
I am an American, so forgive me, but I was under the impression that UWaterloo was also regarded as one of, if not the best, CS schools in Canada. I would argue that many of the more elite universities have managed to beat back this trend for the most part, as I do not believe that Stanford or MIT are graduating substandard computer science students.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me that you have it exactly backwards. First, as a university professor (in the U.S.), I don't have a supervisor in the sense the term is used in business. Yes, my department has a chair, but this is a "first among equals" position, periodically elected from among the members of the department. Governance is mostly collegial in nature, and much of the evaluation & promotion process is handled by committee…
You don't have a supervisor. You have many and they hide behind anonymity -- namely your peers who evaluate your papers, grant proposals, etc. In a way this is much worse than having a supervisor in industry. At least your supervisor wants you to succeed. Your peers not so much unless it suits their agenda. The freedom you have is only an illusion. What good is this freedom if your grant proposals / papers get reject…
Moreover, your freedom is severely restricted by the scientific approach demanded by computer science. It is hard to fund/publish novel ideas that are not easy to evaluate.
What? That's the point -- science is hard. If it weren't hard it wouldn't be worth doing. I guess you could argue that academia is bad because you don't get to sit around and jerk off and collect a pay check, and you'd be right, but you would completely be missing the point.
For me, academia is about examining the limits of our knowledge in a field and then working to expand it.
The freedom you have is only an illusion. What good is this freedom if your grant proposals / papers get rejected?
Fantastic! It means you are not good enough! (or your idea isn't anyway) The scientific community does not accept substandard research or conclusions and rightly so. Academia is not fun and games but it can be rewarding in its own way.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
And probably a lot easier in the modern day as more and more people get access to the web. I'm very interested in web learning and am trying to put something together for it too.
I've had a long conversation with someone that is very much into this and there are some challenges but it definitely is possible. Already there are tons of lectures online in flash video format. It's amazing the stuff you can learn about but to actually make lesson material and tests work in an online environment is far from simple (cheating for instance!).
I imagined something along an entirely different approach. Putting videos online is just doing it the same way over a new medium. I am thinking of a way to take advantage of what the web has to offer.
We'll see how it goes.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me that you have it exactly backwards. First, as a university professor (in the U.S.), I don't have a supervisor in the sense the term is used in business. Yes, my department has a chair, but this is a "first among equals" position, periodically elected from among the members of the department. Governance is mostly collegial in nature, and much of the evaluation & promotion process is handled by committee…
You don't have a supervisor. You have many and they hide behind anonymity -- namely your peers who evaluate your papers, grant proposals, etc. In a way this is much worse than having a supervisor in industry. At least your supervisor wants you to succeed. Your peers not so much unless it suits their agenda. The freedom you have is only an illusion. What good is this freedom if your grant proposals / papers get reject…
While there is some truth to what you say, I've seen a few startups fail because they lost focus. While there may be fewer people to oppose you if you want to experiment with truely novel ideas in a startup, you're still increasing your risk doing so. Startups should avoid experimenting until after they are profitable.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had a long conversation with someone that is very much into this and there are some challenges but it definitely is possible. Already there are tons of lectures online in flash video format. It's amazing the stuff you can learn about but to actually make lesson material and tests work in an online environment is far from simple (cheating for instance!).
I imagined something along an entirely different approach. Putting videos online is just doing it the same way over a new medium. I am thinking of a way to take advantage of what the web has to offer. We'll see how it goes.
Yes, I got that, sorry for not being clearer. The videos are a simple starting point, there is no interaction and so on, it's just like watching TV (only worse quality...).
The subject of the discussion was basically a complete virtual education from grade school level all the way up to university level. Interactive lectures, web based self-study units the works.
We realized that this is a very complex undertaking and that it would require fairly massive funds to be executed properly as well as an enormous amount of expertise.
Re: Why I am Not a Professor, or The Decline and Fall of the British University
#40That was very interesting. I live in what you'd call a 3d world country (Mexico), and this stuff makes me think about why empires fall and others rise... The rising stars get to watch how an empire falls ;-) One of my dreams is to open a school that's much better than most of the schools in Mexico, using the good and bad examples of schools in countries like the US and the UK. My 2 cents to leave to the world.
In that case, you should look more closely to elite schools in the US (I have no idea how Cambridge and Oxford changed in the UK). Most of the top 15-20 schools in the United States have succeeded in continuing to graduate competent students.