[Vwoolf] NYT article on VW and writing software

[Mary Ellen Foley]

Hurrah for this guy!

I went to grad school the first time armed with a BA in chemistry from a
liberal arts university at which I'd spent most of my time playing music
and reading books that weren't about science, so I wasn't prepared for what
I'd gotten myself into.  But before I extricated myself (with an MS), I'd
audited enough classes over in the computer science department to jump
right into a job as a software engineer in a Silicon Valley that was still
run on the talents of people without computer science degrees.  At one
company, my boss was a history major and the guy at the next desk was a
music major; my husband, a philosophy major, was in another group in the
same building.

Stanford, back then, said you couldn't teach computer science in four
years, so they gave MS and PhD degrees, but not BS degrees, in the
subject.  Oh, you could teach software engineering in four -- much, much
less than four! -- but that, they said at the time, wasn't an academic
subject.  "That's a trade," said they, "and we aren't a trade school."  It
wasn't until the rest of the world started offering computer science
degrees and enough alums complained that they were at a disadvantage in the
job market because employers wanted people with computer science degrees,
some employers even requiring them, that Stanford started offering such
things. (So who's not a trade school now, eh?)

And if we didn't actually apply what we knew about Virginia Woolf or the
Yalta Conference or Bach or Hegel to our day-to-day work, well, the people
with scientific backgrounds weren't applying their knowledge of Boyle's Law
or coefficients of friction, either.  You not only don't need to know about
quantum mechanics or hydrodynamics to write a package that manipulates a
list of gate array data for a CAD system, knowing such things *does not
help you.* And anybody who thinks that studying the liberal arts doesn't
involve applying logic or questioning what's already known is only showing
their ignorance of half of the world of scholarship.

Come to think of it, there's a *reason* that the medium through which you
create a piece software is called a 'language', and that the act of
creating it is called 'writing.'

Mary Ellen


On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 1:45 PM, <kllevenback at att.net> wrote:

>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/opinion/sunday/to-write-software-read-novels.html?_r=0
>
> Thought I sent this on Sunday--but maybe not.
> Cheers--Karen Levenback
>
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