Re: [OT] Software Engineering at 14 (was: Re: Beginner's Language?)

["FM" <danfm@dartmouth.edu>]

"Andreas Krennmair" <a.krennmair@aon.at> wrote:
> FM <danfm@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > > If somebody's not talented, he will
> > > leave school after one year anyway.
> >
> >  I love the logic there. Would the kid feel the same about himself
> >  when he leaves the school for whatever reason? It's not as though
> >  there's a clear line between the "talented" and the "untalented"
> >  either.
> The line IS drawn clearly within the first year. Those who get it, have good
> marks on the tests in subjects like programming and "basics of computer
> science", and those who don't, will fail in at least 2 subjects (programming,
> basics of computer science, sometimes also accounting, and quite often
> maths).

Lovely assertion. How do you know? Even worse than using test
scores or grades to evaluate kids is putting blind trust in
evaluations based on those measures. This is only tangentially
related to the original point but if you think you can judge
14 year-olds purely based on their grades, well, I hope you
don't become a teacher.


> > > And those who are in the
> > > higher classes are very motivated because everybody likes the stuff they're
> > > doing.
> >
> >  I would think they would be just as motivated if they were studying
> >  the same stuff on their own.
> Of course they would, but in school they're supported and trained by
> professionals, either having several years of experience in the industry or
> being respectable computer science professors.

I think the better test of someone's talent and motivation is
whether one needs this type of support and/or training.


> >  Frankly, writing a primitive OS (that's what I would have to assume)
> >  is a great exercise, not an achievement of any kind. Age is hardly a
> >  factor.
> Well, I wouldn't call it too primitive, since it has some built-in layer
> that makes in binary compatible with Linux. AFAIK, you can also easily
> replace the scheduler, and they already have a quite good scheduler for
> hard realtime applications.

Perhaps I should've said "trivial" or "of no theoretical or
practical significance." In any case, there's absolutely nothing
informative about this OS on the web as far as I could find,
except a short description on TUNES.org, which basically says the
system is a hack, but an impressive one in terms of the amount of
work put into it.


Dan.