JMNorris wrote:
> BCS <ao@pathlink.com> wrote in news:55391cb32ebb78caa9ac8a83e146
> @news.digitalmars.com:
> 
>>One of the best classes I have taken was symbolic logic (Phil 202 IIRC). I'll never know why that is a Philosophy class and not a math class.
> 
> The reason is mostly historical.  Logic has been part of philosophy since the ancient Greeks, but wasn't sufficienlty well developed to be treated with mathematical rigor until Frege (second half of the 19th century).  IIRC, it isn't until Hibert that you get logic addressed as a fully mathematical subject.  Nowadays, both math and philosophy departments teach logic, though with a somewhat different emphasis.  Math departments generally teach it primarily at a grad student level.  Philosophy departments teach it at both grad and undergrad levels.

I took a class in symbolic logic at the university. Boolean expressions have never been the same after that. I sure wish I'd learnt the stuff much earlier.

On Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:57:17 -0700, Manfred_Nowak <svv1999@hotmail.com> wrote:

>> Build one to throw away.
>
> That's not a contradiction.
> One is still free to define "coding the real thing" to be
> "programming".

Oh, aye. For that matter, Brooks' own feelings on the matter have outgrown the bare "throw away" project.

But in any project of significant size, you don't code the final version on the first try. (*I* never do, I'll tell you that!) There is a lot of evolution and re-design based on experiment and discovery. Heck, that is the heart of, for example, scrum. No experiment is a failure if you learn from it; naetheless, there is often an element of it that you throw away.

Put it this way: if only the lines of code that actually ship are "the real thing", then I get paid a lot for not-programming.

Walter Bright wrote:
> 
> The curriculum was not designed to teach knowledge, but to teach you how to think.

That kind of college degrees are often (if not allways), the best ones.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Developer, MSc. in CS/E graduate
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> The curriculum was not designed to teach knowledge, but to teach you how to think.
> 
> That kind of college degrees are often (if not allways), the best ones.
> 

I think it's the only kind worth having <g>.

Memorizing things is what computers are for.

"Georg Wrede" <georg@nospam.org> wrote in message news:486BA245.2030308@nospam.org...
> JMNorris wrote:
>> BCS <ao@pathlink.com> wrote in news:55391cb32ebb78caa9ac8a83e146 @news.digitalmars.com:
>>
>>>One of the best classes I have taken was symbolic logic (Phil 202 IIRC). I'll never know why that is a Philosophy class and not a math class.
>>
>> The reason is mostly historical.  Logic has been part of philosophy since the ancient Greeks, but wasn't sufficienlty well developed to be treated with mathematical rigor until Frege (second half of the 19th century). IIRC, it isn't until Hibert that you get logic addressed as a fully mathematical subject.  Nowadays, both math and philosophy departments teach logic, though with a somewhat different emphasis.  Math departments generally teach it primarily at a grad student level.  Philosophy departments teach it at both grad and undergrad levels.
>
> I took a class in symbolic logic at the university. Boolean expressions have never been the same after that. I sure wish I'd learnt the stuff much earlier.

I found that my programming experience made classes in symbolic logic (and discrete math) to be agonisingly slow-pased. I ended up serverely irritating the rest of the class because I was being so pedantic about all of the instructor's examples, just so I could stay awake. Although I suppose I made up for that in other areas - I never could pass German 101 (well, technically I did, but I think the prof was bending the rules in my case). It was too close to my native language of English to make any sense ;)