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Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

Who is this guy? Where can you teach post-doc computer science without ever having taken a course in CS, let alone a degree?

Obviously a degree is not a necessary condition for success and it's always bothered me that people like Michael Faraday had to battle academic and class prejudice before changing the world.

However I don't think it's unreasonable to see a bio of past projects/companies/research papers.

"Despite having taught Computer Science at the graduate and post-doctorate levels, he has no degrees and has never taken a course in Computer Science"

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My first compiler (still in use) was for the Burroughs B6500 mainframe in 1970. During my brief and inglorious college career I did not take a CS class. In fact, there were no CS classes. The college didn't even own a computer. Yes, there were such times, in living memory, hard as it may be to imagine.

These days you need a union card (i.e. a CS degree) to get a job. That's a shame. I've been refused a university position for lack of a PhD - to teach a subject that I largely invented. There's something wrong with that.

We have no such requirements on the Mill team.

Indeed there is something wrong here. I am sure it isn't easy to identify those with scholarly authority. Sad to see that they are missing it.

That being said, you are still having scholarly impact! Your talks have taught me to question all my fundamental assumptions when it comes to architecture, compilers, and computing!

I love following your peoples work, and I can't wait to see its product!

>These days you need a union card (i.e. a CS degree) to get a job. That's a shame. I've been refused a university position for lack of a PhD - to teach a subject that I largely invented. There's something wrong with that.

My only degree is in physics and my career has yet to be harmed by this

Speaking of the Mill team, now that Mill Computing is exiting stealth mode, will there be any positions available for recent grads in the next few months/years? Say, someone with several years serious internship experience in (of all things) working on software teams alongside CPU development teams? (not really sure of a shorter way to state that... someone who spends a lot of time single-stepping assembly? ;))

> Ivan Godard has designed, implemented or led the teams for 11 compilers for a variety of languages and targets, an operating system, an object-oriented database, and four instruction set architectures. He participated in the revision of Algol68 and is mentioned in its Report, was on the Green team that won the Ada language competition, designed the Mary family of system implementation languages, and was founding editor of the Machine Oriented Languages Bulletin. He is a Member Emeritus of IFIPS Working Group 2.4 (Implementation languages) and was a member of the committee that produced the IEEE and ISO floating-point standard 754-2011.

http://millcomputing.com/docs/encoding/

Why the downvote? It just seems to be an unusual bio and would be interesting to see the history leading up the mill: http://www.ftpress.com/authors/bio.aspx?a=DE5F140D-E5BF-4E83...

He was on THE "green team" you young whipper-snapper and before that he worked on Mary and Mary2, languages from the long lost mists of time. After a certain point you don't need to go to school and people start asking you to teach them.

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