[xquery-talk] XML/XQuery academic conferences ?

[David Lee]

Perhaps the us and uk differ substantially in academic philosophy

Sent from my iPad (excuse the terseness) 
David A Lee
dlee at calldei.com


On Oct 12, 2011, at 7:22 PM, Michael Kay <mike at saxonica.com> wrote:

> 
> 
>>> 
>>> 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
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