[xquery-talk] XML/XQuery academic conferences ?

[Markus Pilman]

I would never disagree. I am just disagreeing with David who seems to
be at the position that academia is useless and PhDs are unable to do
anything useful (he really seems to hate PhD people - it seems to be a
personal thing, so no discussion needed).

Markus

On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 6:07 PM, Shannon <Shiflett at virginia.edu> wrote:
> On Oct 12, 2011, at 4:14 PM, Markus Pilman wrote:
>
> Without academics there wouldn't be computer science.
>
> True, but to be fair, shouldn't we declare it a team effort? In the '50's,
> computer science did not exist officially at the science-intensive
> institution of MIT--academics in the math department warned people to stay
> away from computers--most people considered the thought that computers
> themselves could actually be a field of study to be ridiculous. The
> unofficial slogan of the math department was, "There's no such thing as
> Computer Science--it's witchcraft." Without Kotok, Gosper, Samson,
> Deutsch--non-academic hackers--McCarthy would not have formed the first CS
> course at MIT. The hackers weren't PhDs, but they shared motivations with
> the academics: To advance the field in order to make contributions to
> humanity. I've been reading Steven Levy's "Hackers"….