Besides, higher education is only about coursework the same way international travel is only about airports...
Would he like to tell the world how it should approach physical therapy based on the one time he sprained his ankle?
     

I know the US is permanently emotionally and intellectually scarred due to the impact of fucking puritans,
but calling Playboy "porn" is way over the edge. If Playboy is "porn", then looking at images of the
Venus de Milo must be considered "viewing amputee fetish porn"...

As a rabid M$ hater, anything that keeps the garbage-ware that is Windows out of the hands of the typical idiot consumer and helps break the retarded view that "Computer must mean windoze" is good for technology in the long run. Good work Intel, and good luck to ABM*. May the beast from Redmond continue to die the death of a thousand paper cuts..

*Anyone But Microsoft

Start with teachers playing the role of overpaid coke-addicted managers & sales people with no ethics telling them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it (despite knowing less than the 5th graders). Move on to telling them to steal designs and cut corners on safety in order to meet a deadline for the quarterly numbers. Weather they pull it off or not then becomes irrelevant. Tell them they cost too much and that Chinese and Indian 5th graders can do better work for 1/10th of the cost. Send them home without recess or snack. That'll give them the real experience of any sort of engineering in the western world....

Back in the early '90 the whole HST vs V32.bis was a big deal for a couple of years. It's a bit sad to not see this mentioned in terms of the impact to the PC modem world...

Steve Yegge's post is (line for line) more of a masturbation session on how cool Google is.

Although he also makes the point quite well that if you're all rock star coders in a company
driven by engineering instead of marketing, you don't need no "steenkin'" methodology. But
then again, that's more of my first complaint now isn't it;)

He's 100% on. Any 20 person company that needs TPS reports for executives is either trying to become too big too fast
or has a bunch of "leaders" who don't understand core business concepts. Either way, the mere existence of that should
be a warning sign of impending trouble. Statistics and metrics on anything in the IT/Software Development world are almost
alway a poor substitute for sitting down and _LEARNING_ the business from the ground up to understand WTF is going on
especially in the scope of a small company or focused division.

For example, I'm in a 42 person software division of a much larger company. Our TPS reports exist because the top brass don't understand jack shit about building quality software. However, they trust us enough to have given us room for 10 years and so we give them pretty pictures:)

I loved the "holy crap" moment I had when reading the section in PCL about "before" "after" and "around" which I've
used a career Java developer without seeing so much as a hit of credit from the Aspect Oriented community. Perhaps
the props are out there, but I felt some more overt credit was due for the fact the Lisp has had this for some time:)

Haskell is on on my list of things to check out. There's a nifty "easy to swallow intro" at: http://learnyouahaskell.com
and I'm hoping to get over a previous slightly abusive exposure I got to it in college. Being young and foolish,
I didn't like the instructor and transfered my dislike onto the language:)

<quote><p>
Programming, I've been doing this for living for two decades, but I have no clue what those things are. Well, except for Rails I did read a bit about.
</p><p>
Probably all for the best, I'd guess.</p></quote>

Seriously?!?! Two decades and you've never looked at LISP?!?! I've only got a mere 1.2 decades and I've been in the mode of learning like
a son-of-a-bitch on all this stuff after slacking for most of the easy-peasy dot-com boom. Showing up and only learning what you need
for your job is not going to help you see a third decade. But hey, your career man...

O'Reilly might not want to bother...

Check it out: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/

.. and don't even get started on how bad my pictograms are...

As in, if you smash the device into an iPhone, you can kill the iPhone and the device in question will keep working. Given what the G1 and Palm Pre have turned out to be, this is the only true valid definition of the term "iPhone killer" in the market today;)

A number of weak typing language zealots like to point out that Design patterns is simply a way to make strongly typed languages "suck less".
This can be a compelling argument in terms of simplicity and syntax in examples when you take a look at books like "Design Patterns in Ruby" compared with "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". There's also an argument that strong typing is a form of tight coupling and antithetical to half of the Object Oriented axiom, "loose coupling, strong cohesion". Given the momentum in popularity that unit testing across multiple languages and development methodologies has (rightfully!) enjoyed, is it time to encourage language designers and programmers to move away from strong typing usage and substitute better testing practices?

You must have attended a private or EXTREMELY large school. Most US schools are nowhere near the described Netherlands system. At best, you've got three tracks - "honors" which targets the cookie-cutter wrote memory college tracked kids, standard for those who aren't fighting or don't care about math scores WRT university applications, and "essentials" for poor suffering masses who are not picking up or don't care to do the work. This is the situation in Washington State, Kent School district which is the 4th largest district in a High School with over 2600 students. Even this delineation of "skill" is still cranked through the un-inspired compulsory process Lockhart complains about. If you want to know why, check out John Taylor Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education" (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/).

Saying knowledge comes from a schooling about as correct as saying milk comes from a store. When you understand in both cases it's just simple packaging and processing, you can start asking questions about what it is, why it is, and how you can get it on your own, and how to evaluate the quality of the sources you get it from.