You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

Point

You may have seen this blog post before — it was linked from Slashdot. Its author demonstrates the other kind of backwards thinking that perpetuates computer science/software engineering today. He's not overly concerned, at least in that post, with management techniques, models, waterfalls, etc. Instead, he's deeply concerned that computer science graduates these days haven't taken courses on XML, XST, XForms and XWhateverTheHell that his company uses to develop corporate web sites.

Frankly, I don't get it. First, what singles out the development of corporate web sites as being particularly worth focus in a CS curriculum? Is he really claiming that XML formats are so inordinately complex that people should have to devote entire college courses to them? Personally, I disagree. Just as I would claim that anyone who can understand a rich text editor can understand HTML (or TeX or whatever your document markup language of choice is), I would claim that anyone who can understand HTML can grok XML. We aren't talking about a paradigm shifting approach to computation here; we're talking about structuring documents in nested blocks surrounded by little pointy brackets.

Second, where do people keep getting the idea that college is supposed to be career prep? If past history is any indicator, XML will be about as relevant in twenty years as COBOL is now: it'll be around in a lot of legacy systems, and everyone who can will be using something new involving an even more exciting letter than X — maybe Q. I'd ask our author the same thing I ask everyone who's intent on teaching all sorts of Microsoft toolchain-specific stuff: will your students understand the next technology to come down the pipeline? The next after that? If it turns out next week that everyone is using S-expressions and Scheme, how quickly will your company be able to adapt? The key to this kind of thing isn't a detailed knowledge of individual frameworks (platforms, services, et. fucking. cetera), it's knowing how to think. That's where college comes in. You can teach XSLUT on your own time.

(Thankfullly, many of the comments already posted on his 'blog make the same point I do.)

Counterpoint

There's been a flap lately about Cuba's offer to help out in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. I believe China's been in on the same game, and there have been quite a number of offers of aid that have been accepted — from the UN, NATO, the EU, etc. — but I'll focus on Cuba because they make an easy target.

To start, though, I'm not really trying to make a point one way or the other about the way the US government has responded to Hurricane Katrina because I think just about everyone from just about every color of the political spectrum can agree that it's been fucking awful. In fact, given that the company I work for makes planning and coordination software that would have oodles of uses in situations like this (if only Homeland Security would pay us to develop it), hey, pile on.

But getting back to Cuba: whatever you may think about everything that's been going on in this country, it's hard to miss the fact that Cuba's "aid offer" is a political move. Cuba, frankly, is not in very good shape right now, what with the grinding poverty and the starving citizens and what not. Fidel Castro has plenty of problems to deal with at home, and it's interesting to wonder how many Cubans would have been denied care had his 1500 doctors come to the United States. In fact, Fidel is fully aware of the political implications; otherwise, he wouldn't have refused most (all?) previous US offers of aid, most recently when Hurricane Denis hit Cuba in July.

And it's not hard to find this stuff out: everything I just mentioned is from articles on the front page (or one link therefrom) on CNN.com.

So, my question is, where do bloggers, currently enrolled at Ivy League universities, get off writing (paraphrasing) about how if even Cuba is offering us help and our government just won't take it, what has the world come to? Is thinking just not in fashion anywhere any more?