My comment had a handful of upvotes over the holiday weekend then has been downvoted as the CS grads return to work.
I have long believed the weekend HN crowd is wiser than the weekday crowd.
I have also believed that CS may contribute to the urge to write "complicated software". Your admission reinforces this belief.
I like software that tries to avoid complexity. Any lazy person can write a complicated program, get it to compile and run. The world is full of such software. Consequently, it is nearly impossible to avoid. But that is different from consciously selecting it and we cannot infer that usage under these circumstances implies approval.
rk dewar, dmr, djb, a@kx, etc. none of them majored in CS as far as I know. Despite the lack of a CS "education", I still value and rely on what they produced. I consciously seek out such work.
The point of my comments is simple: a CS degree is not a prerequisite to writing great software. Call that a strawman if you like. I still think it is a point worth making when someone is blogging about low numbers of CS grads.
I have long believed the weekend HN crowd is wiser than the weekday crowd.
I have also believed that CS may contribute to the urge to write "complicated software". Your admission reinforces this belief.
I like software that tries to avoid complexity. Any lazy person can write a complicated program, get it to compile and run. The world is full of such software. Consequently, it is nearly impossible to avoid. But that is different from consciously selecting it and we cannot infer that usage under these circumstances implies approval.
rk dewar, dmr, djb, a@kx, etc. none of them majored in CS as far as I know. Despite the lack of a CS "education", I still value and rely on what they produced. I consciously seek out such work.
The point of my comments is simple: a CS degree is not a prerequisite to writing great software. Call that a strawman if you like. I still think it is a point worth making when someone is blogging about low numbers of CS grads.