I found this PDF very interesting:

Hardware: Looking Back From the 1980s At Computers In Education

"As someone who went to high school in the '80s, this newsletter from 1980 (PDF) is a blast from the past. An interview with Microsoft talks up its BASIC language product and predicts voice control of computers in five years. Advertisements for Compute magazine, which was about to go monthly, and an article about a computer 'network' in Minnesota that connects some fax machine-looking terminal to a central computer over telephone lines. Lots of Atari, TI and RadioShack news too. It's a reminder from 30 years ago that we are still not using technology effectively in education."

Ah MECC, I recall it well...Well, I recall it.

It's kind of disconcerting seeing a newsletter you remember clearly as being white is not only now digital, but yellowed with age before archiving.

You know how slahsdot has this "Ask slashdot" thing? This was interesting:

Ask Slashdot: What Knowledge Gaps Do Self-Taught Programmers Generally Have?

"I, like many others here, have learned to program by myself. Starting at a young age and learning through fiddling I have taught myself C++, Java, python, PHP, etc., but what I want to know is what I haven't learned that is important when taught in a traditional computer science curriculum. I have a degree in physics, so I'm not averse to math. What books, websites, or resources would you recommend to fill in the gaps?"

One comment:

Creating a good database (or object) model, or code structure is not something trivial and usually self-made programmers are not the best in those fields.

Huh. I'd say I'm very good at creating a database model. Is database stuff generally required for a CS degree?

I had a programming class in high school and a Fortran class in college, but that's the extent of my formal programming education. Anyone else here a programmer who didn't get a CS degree?

It annoys me when programmers don't understand automata theory, like how you can't use a regular expression to find balanced, nested parenthesis.

There are also lots of instances where programmers use brute-force methods where there are more elegant algorithms, like binary search.

OTOH, there are things that CS majors are taught which they accept as gospel, like object-orientation and type theory, which really shouldn't be as sacrosanct as they think.

I have a degree in physics, but I did minor in math and CS.

I can see the point, but CS degree or not you need to keep learning period. I learned C, lisp, some simulation language, Fortran(Physics, not CS), and data structures in College, but had to learn C++, Java, Perl, SQL, the Win API, the Win32 API, Mac API, Swing API, and Eclipse API among other things. I don't use plain C, and I always found a data structure already existing in a library.

Nowadays though, I don't think you can get away without a CS degree so easily coming out of college.

I have a CS degree (well, math and CS) and we didn't spend much time on data, since databases weren't prevalent. We did trees and sorts and crap like that.

I would consider data modelling my strength now, even though I don't program for pay--I'm still heavily involved in that part of the technical designs of the systems I work on.

I don't think you can get away without a CS degree so easily coming out of college.

Yeah, I don't know if they were necessary when I was in school, but I certainly wouldn't recommend trying without one unless you were a serious prodigy--and even then, your employer will probably want to see it.

We did trees and sorts and crap like that.

Yeah, I did a lot of that in college as well and then hardly ever had to do it since typically there's a library call that'll do it for me. Code I don't have to maintain.

One funny thing I've noticed with probing the job market around here. It's very hard for me to make recruiters (or relatives and friends for that matter) understand I don't work in an IT department, I work for a company that sells software. I've done work on software that sat on a shelf in Best Buy (not anymore though, different company).

mr. flea is an engineer who does a lot of (specialized) programming and worked as a software developer (for specialized software) for 2 years. I think he learned Fortan and C in college (grad. 1993), but since I've known him has self-taught C++ and Java.

Working in industry was really good for him in terms of skills and best practices. When he went back to academia, he was shocked that some people writing MScEs were using an excel spreadsheet to do some programming functions, and he pitched a number of fits about the inability of people he worked with to consistently use a version management thing he set up for them.