...

to participate. junior colleges are graduating students who would not have passed out of tenth grade 20-30 years ago.

<etc. about Gen 3 (-5) as in Tim's example>

Isn't this merely an effect of mass education instead of elite_only education? And the peak performers will do as Not really; high schools have gotten worse -- it was amusing for me to read Robert Heinlein's rant in the first chapters of "Have spacesuit..." because

On Fri, 6 Dec 1996 13:10:57 +0100 (MET), Asgaard wrote: the school he was complaining about would have been GOOD today.

A real difference, though, is the relative lack of multidisciplinary theorists nowadays, I mean with a deep understanding of several 'unrelated' fields of knowledge. Most of us with actual competence in a certain area are SUBspecialists. This is natural since the knowledge bases have exploded to become impossible for any one man or woman to comprehend. An industrial cobol programmer probably doesn't know shit about Java (perhaps a bad example; I'm not a programmer, but I know a guy who makes a good living off cobol!) You aren't that far off - at our developer's conference most people didn't know why Java was so hot. Particularly funny since Acucobol users have been getting that compile-once/run-anywhere ability for quite awhile.

# Chris Adams <adamsc@io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp # <cadams@acucobol.com> | send mail with subject "send PGPKEY" "That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them." --- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial)