Re: A database theory resource - ideas

Bruce C. Baker wrote:
> "paul c" <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac> wrote in message
> news:ooHKh.26513$zU1.14184_at_pd7urf1no...
>

>>Bruce C. Baker wrote:
>>
>>
>>>...
>>>I don't completely agree with either you or Bob B., but this whole 
>>>discussion is moot anyway. Ninety-nine percent of the programmers I know 
>>>don't own even /one/ computer book, and nine-tenths of the remaining one 
>>>percent never progressed beyond chapter three in the ones they do own. 
>>>:-(
>>
>>That trumps me as I don't know 1,000 programmers.
>>
>>p
>>

I've known many hundreds who called themselves programmers or somesuch but only worked closely with a few dozen or so, ie., where I regularly did something to their code and they did something to mine. I can remember three who stood out because in everything they did, they were an order of magnitude faster than anybody else, same goes for accuracy.   Of those, I'd say two were well-read but still required supervision. The third wasn't and didn't. Another two were well-read, being former CS professors, however one broke everything he touched and the other was afraid to touch anything. I'd say very few could even remember their own theses. Nearly all the people with several degrees retained no abiding interest in their chosen subjects. The only people I've know who were otherwise chose not to go the corporate employee route.

Never considered myself well-read as I followed Edward de Bono's advice - if you want to master a subject, buy every book about it but don't read them all the way through. For years my library was many, many, times bigger than anybody I knew but I kept it only for reference. However, I considered myself more of an office worker than programmer and the former is what I thought most people I worked with were even though they had fancier titles. At the same time, most of them didn't think I was a programmer, even though I'd usually get the oddball assignments that others would turn down because there was no prototype for them to copy. Being the least "educated" I often ended up writing the prototypes for them. When I would walk down halls with office after office containing a high-priced developer or rows and rows of consultant workstations, it was obvious what most of them were doing at any given time which had nothing to do with their supposed job descriptions - most of the day was spent trying to figure out what to do next. I eventually learned that life would be easier if I stopped pointing this out to the big bosses.

I'd say that the most noticeable single reading deficiency I've seen among people with CS degrees, even PhD's, is completely inadequate education in the basics of database, often they've never heard of predicate calculus and have never taken any logic course at all.

It's quite clear from this group and others that most people in the db field have no idea why Codd proposed tables, still confusing that representation with relations. It doesn't require wide reading, just careful reading of a few free papers. In fact, when it comes to the now-ordinary CS techniques that have been invented in the last forty years, I think a couple of dozen papers would suffice to replace the biggest library of books.

One phenomenon hasn't changed since I've been around. Since the late 1960's when the machinery cost more than people, to now when the opposite is true, it's still the case that 9 out of 10 people working in IT are more or less incompetent and even if they can apply a technique will never be able to justify if the application is appropriate. This is also probably true of less technical fields, but those are less crucial to society. I conclude that the topic is beyond most people's grasp, what's more that nothing can be done about this as it involves not only IQ but taste as well.

p Received on Sat Mar 17 2007 - 15:01:30 CET