[xquery-talk] XML/XQuery academic conferences ?

[Michael Kay]

>>
>> Few  of the cs phds  I've interviewed could do ANY of the tasks you quote.  None had to pass an exam in making programs that actually worked
>>
>>
I have to say my experience is the opposite. I've worked with a great 
many software developers who were good at making things, but lacked the 
education to discover the theory of how they ought to be made: they were 
mechanics rather than engineers. As a result I've seen a lot of people 
building things using home-grown invented techniques that were vastly 
inferior to the state of the art available from the research literature. 
Or doing crazy things like trying to parse XML with regular expressions. 
You get something that works most of the time (if you're lucky), but 
often costs a lot more and performs a lot worse than if the designers 
had had a higher level of professional education.

Of course that doesn't mean that everyone with a PhD is a good 
programmer or designer, but most of those I have worked with have been.

Michael Kay
Saxonica