The real push towards advancement comes only when people dare to think different, not being content with what’s already available.

It was a homosexual who challenged the society’s fidgety attitude towards his sexuality to give us what we know as Computer Science today. Machine intelligence, algorithms et al. What if he was to take the advice of someone like you who pretend to be something like a hardened cowboy, scarred by the ordeals of real life, throwing around priceless pearls of wisdom like the ones above? Yeah, right. You wouldn’t even have the internet, leave alone typing a pile of BS in a comment box.

There have been a lot of personalities like him not only in Computer Science but all spheres of life, throughout history. Looking back at all of them and assuming if they all had decided to play it safe, we would have been still gouging each other’s eyes out with sticks for sure.

I call it the “Cause & Effect” situation. Most students are confused about what the cause is and what the corresponding effect is.

For example, they think that “Job” is the “cause” and the “effect” is “study hard, learn C/Java/Foo”, whereas, it’s the exact opposite.

I have, for the record, never met anybody in my college life who understood this relationship. They were all behind “marks” & “grades” so that they could secure a job at the end of the course.

They would rather learn “wrong” things and copy incorrect programs to get good marks than to really investigate and learn the real thing.

Some of them were really interested in learning “Linux” and that was mostly because they thought “Linux” had a good “market” and so on.

I think that is the main problem. Student don’t really know why they should be studying CS. When somebody like Sayamindu had been hacking away since he was a teenager, learning new things, having fun, fixing things, others in his age-group would have been busy taking tuitions, doing homework, so that they could get into a “good” college. But why? Because everybody else is doing so.

This is a very complicated problem to solve. I think the roots of this problem is in the Indian culture itself.

I have absolutely no idea how to fix it. And no, preaching to the students, etc. doesn’t work.

You will not admit it, but let me tell you that at the end of the day this is just sheer arrogance. Not benevolence or some kind of love to spread knowledge and creativity. It’s a way you cope with your life.

If you give up your arrogance, you will understand why these people ‘working in herds’ are so important for _your_ existence. If not for these people, you won’t have the opportunity or options in the IT world that we have today in India. We are part of the herd and they are as important to this whole structure as we are to them. No point trying to transform each other.

That said, I spend more time thinking and talking of how arranged marriage is a sophisticated form of cattle breeding. To me, changing people to not have an arranged marriage than learn cool new languages is more important to our society.

I would very much like them to be well grounded in fundamentals – and, that means really understanding programming meta fundamentals. In fact, going down to the level of comprehending how programming choices and hardware architectures inter-mesh and may or may not lead to best paths to solution. My gripe isn’t that the hiring companies don’t value Python. It is more that the culture of hiring that we have, somewhat encourages and rewards mediocrity, provides incentives to herd mentality and stifles any reasonable modicum of intellect or insight. Admittedly, the current system of education also ensures that the students don’t actually “learn” much, but the context to learn and the scope is always there. I believe that telling the students about the need to learn is what we should be working more on, rather than just being too concerned with the language.

Let me ask you the same question, a version of which I told to sayam in IRC:

Guiding students to break out of the bonds of _only_ formal education system (I assume thats what you mean somewhat) is good idea, definitely young people will go out, explore and learn new things that will help them and will also help the community.

But the question is; considering a CS student: Is it really a good idea to expose them to get-the-job-done-the-easy way things like Python, Ruby or similar scripting language at an early age when they are learning C, Data Structure, Algorithms etc. the hard way? A _normal_ CS grad student will definitely have no idea about real life software development that involves not just coding but testing, benchmarking, QA and what not; so when he is exposed to something like Python in an early age, he most probably won’t prefer learning various sorting/searching algorithms and will instead rely on obj.sort() from these higher level scripting languages which definitely is not a good idea.

Am I totally out of my mind? or this sounds sane?