Decline of Science ?? (Was: Stinger Specs)

[Adamsc]

On Fri, 6 Dec 1996 13:10:57 +0100 (MET), Asgaard wrote:

>> 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
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 at io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp
#  <cadams at 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)