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Comment by tjr | Hacker News Reader

Never stop learning.

Amen. This should be titled "What's your level of formal educational attainment." I know more than a few people who never graduated from college and have far more education than I do.

I agree, but it's too late to change the title.

At least when programming is involved college was a complete (and predicted) waste of time. Only a couple of years ago, some 5 years after college, I found there are programming languages worth learning, books worth reading and paradigms worth exploring. Also made me feel like a complete waste of space, but that's a different thing (and arguably a good one).

It sounds like you may have gone to the wrong college. Over my three years of programming for both enterprise-y SaS companies and agile little tech startups in the valley the most consistently helpful knowledge I have came from my courses in college. If you're doing it right, you shouldn't necessarily study the implementation details of Current Technology, but the theoretic underpinnings of Past, Current, and Future programming.

As an example: most people who code in javascript probably don't cite familiarity with lambdas and closures as a relevant and highly-useful skill, but I certainly would. After I submit this comment I'm going to return to my web app that uses closures to bridge the gap between the DOM and the javascript variable environment. Outcome: awesome. Could you do it with a Javascript for Dummies book? Probably not.

I have this guy to thank: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~mairson/

Lambdas and closures in college? Yup, I definitely went to the wrong one. Well, more like I went to the best my small east-european country (Romania) had to offer, which proved not good enough by far.

Perhaps you should have studied math instead? The education system in Rumania should have a longer experience teaching math.

(But then I only know the German way to teach math at university --- which is very formal, and prepares better for programming than most computer science courses I have heard of.)

web app that uses closures to bridge the gap between the DOM and the javascript variable environment

I'm curious what this means, can you elaborate on that?

Conveniently, I've typed this up in the past:

http://catch-and-sing-the-sun-in-flight.blogspot.com/2009/02...

yeah, this is right. you don't need any college if you just want to be a programmer, but if you want to cool stuff that provably optimal, you need a degree for that. the theoretical foundation for anything (and especially CS) is wondeful and interesting and immeasurably valuable, but completely unnecessary for a vocational coder. if you want to be more than a vocational coder, college, and even masters and phd are absolutely worth doing.

I'm going to quibble:

You don't need a degree for that. I do agree that you need a solid understanding of computing fundamentals. However, you hardly "need" a degree for that. Far to many college drop-outs have built hugely scalable and highly optimized systems for that.

You're just arguing semantics. You're both saying "you need the knowledge you'll gain from earning a good degree".

i'll agree with this. i'm just trying to dissuade young people from dropping out of college to "pursue their dreams." CS is not obvious or trivial stuff, even though learning to scrap together a website in Rails might be. and the two are not the same.

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