Subject: Re: Will Java kill Lisp? From: Erik Naggum <clerik@naggum.no> Date: 1997/09/02 Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3082185140465031@naggum.no> * Samuel S. Paik | (According to a recent report, the number of cs grads is going down! | What are those students thinking?) they look around and see that any uneducated fool can get hired to write "cool" software and make a lot of money from age 16 onwards. they look around and see that if they take a serious CS education, they will have spent the years they could have made a lot of money _paying_ a lot of money, instead, and few will pay them more to recover their losses. instead of assembly languages, we have assembly-line languages, where programmers are as interchangeable as the PC's. some (managers) actually think this is a *great* development. the students aren't the problem -- they think rationally in today's market. the managers are the problem. not only do they buy Microsoft products because Microsoft targets their marketing at untechnological managers, they buy into Microsoft's ideas about programming, as well. nearly everybody else in the software or hardware industries have talked to technologically savvy people, selling products, not "feeling good, feeling safe". unfortunately, it's not exactly considered positive for a manager to be technologically savvy in today's business climate. my impression is that computers have become a blue-collar thing, and that all that really counts is the user interface. these managers will begin to pay attention only after they have run the whole industry into the ground and they can no longer solve all their problems with "more cheap manpower", lawsuits begin to blame bad software, and they actually lose money on their uneducated staff. for this to set in, another decade at today's speed will suffice, and I believe we are still accelerating. it would take an extremely insightful 16-year-old to consider the long view instead of the several hundred thousand dollars he can reap while the managers destroy everything. #\Erik -- 404 You're better off without that file. Trust me.