patrickmcginnis59 10839 (9/12/2013)
can't tell who wrote this comment
'Thanks for pointing that out. I've fixed the quote tags in that message, so it should now be clear who wrote what.
Because we know that many of the really great people in computing/IT/database had not a single academic qualification in computing or in IT or in database. Surely we shouldn't restrict ourselves to people who have more academic qualifications in the field than Alan Turing or Fred Williams or Grace Hopper or John McCarthy or Tony Hoare or Ted Codd or Cliff Jones or Chris Date - if they hadn't been allowed to work in computing we wouldn't have got anywhere near where we are today - they might never have been a relational model to give rise to an RDBMS like SQL Server. Do you think that no-one should have been recruited to work on computers before about 1958, since there were no academic qualifications in Computing or IT way back then? :hehe:
Alan Turing: PhD from Princeton
Fred Williams: Doctorate Magdalen College, Oxford
Grace Hopper: Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale
John McCarthy: Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton
etc etc
Given the time and the contributions, these guys had some pretty solid academic chops and while not disrespecting the ability they in all likelyhood displayed before these academic achievements, they none the less weren't uneducated. Given the state of the art at the time, the sorts of academics they pursued were exactly what you would expect from someone doing the sort of work they did.
I'm not saying that there aren't counter examples of folks without academic qualifications attaining success in computers, but I'm pretty surprised that folks who actually did have the chops were used in the unattributed quote to highlight the supposed uselessness of academics.
The comment you are responding to says nothing about any academic qualifications except those in IT/Computing. So why tell me what I already know, that the people mentioned all had PhDs in mathematics (except Williams, whose PhD was in Electrical Engineering and Jones, whose PhD was in Computer Science but was taken long after the work that made him famous, and Hoare, who never had an earned PhD at all)? PhDs in mathematics (or in electrical engineering) are not academic qualifications in computing (and neither is a BA degree in Litterae Humaniores, which is what Hoare had).
None of the people mentioned had any computing or IT academic qualifications when they did the work in that field that made them famous; and the only one who ever obtained an academic qualification (other than honorary ones) in computing, Cliff Jones, started his research at Oxford University which led to his academic qualification in computing after 15 years working on computing for IBM, in the course of which he developed VDM, and wrote his famous book on rigorous software development methods.
Turing's PhD at Princeton was in mathematics, mostly mathematical Logic (his thesis was entitled Systems of Logic based on Ordinals) but it did introduce the concept of relative computing (augmenting Universal Turing Machines with Oracles) so I suppose you might claim it was partly an academic computing qualification but even if you say that you should note that his invention of the Universal Turing Machine was perhaps his most significant contribution to computing and that of course took place while he was employed (as a Fellow) at King's College, Cambridge before he ever went to Princeton, and hence before he had any academic qualification with any computing content.
Of course you may think that degrees in mathematics are academic qualifications in computing. If so, we'll have to agree to differ. My three degrees are all in mathematics, and if you thing that my research in the semantics of calculi with expressions of infinite length (a strange mixture of set theory and mathematical logic) taught me anything about computing I can assure you that you are wrong.
I do firmly believe that a first degree in mathematics (or pretty well anything else other than non-subjects like social science or psychology or economics) is a better qualification for computing/IT (whether for work in industry or for work in academe) than a first degree in computing/IT. That doesn't make it an academic computing qualification, though.
Tom