IQ Estimates by College Major

[merithyn]

Give it a couple of years.  I'm not saying that you'll change your mind, but the programming projects are going to get a hell of a lot harder than they must be right now.

Yeah, I don't want to argue it, but the complexity of the projects becomes the limiting factor in success pretty quickly, rather than any syntax.

Hell, once you've been doing it long enough, you don't even care all that much about languages and syntax.

The addage that 90% of *good* software engineering happens before you open the IDE becomes so totally true you don't even find it interesting anymore.

I recognize that I'm at the very beginning of all of this, and I have a lot to learn. I also know that it's only going to get harder. My point was only that right now, it seems a lot like learning a foreign language more than anything else.

[Iormlund]

If you are just taking it for the credits or because it is mandatory that seems reckless.  I mean you either need or want an A in this stupid class so why would you risk it by skipping class?  I had to take this retarded theatre class but I damn made sure I was there to hear about Lesbian theatre rejecting patriarchal structures like characters and plots and scripts in their bold efforts to make theatre as shitty as possible.  Because when a class is that stupid I would hate myself forever if I do not get an A.

Cal got lucky though but man...that was ballsy.

Meh. It really depends on the subject and yourself.

I attended Materials class maybe half a dozen times in the whole year (plus labs). I got not just my best grade ever in college, but also the best grade in class.

[Eddie Teach]

Learning the syntax(and logic) is a lot more fun than learning the vocabulary(aka the huge variety of library functions).

[Iormlund]

Yeah. Fortunately languages share tons of functions and a good IDE lets you find out quickly what the equivalent of string.split(Delimiter) or whatever is.

[merithyn]

Learning the syntax(and logic) is a lot more fun than learning the vocabulary(aka the huge variety of library functions).

So far, it seems so. Figuring out programming is a lot like working a logic puzzle, and I really enjoy that.

[Barrister]

Is this a second Bachelor's for you, Valmy?

Yep.  Somehow that history degree was not propelling me forward in the work force.

You know, I ran into the same problem! Who knew?! 

I knew.   

Despite being a big history nerd, I knew a history degree would be fairly useless...

[Admiral Yi]

I was thinking the other day that the problem with history is that undiscovered stuff is running out.  Everything now is just a gloss on a gloss on a gloss.

[The Brain]

History as a field of serious study has barely been touched. It's 500 years behind science when it comes to the methods used and the results achieved.

[Admiral Yi]

You're a homo.

[The Brain]

At least I don't have a small penis.

[merithyn]

I was thinking the other day that the problem with history is that undiscovered stuff is running out.  Everything now is just a gloss on a gloss on a gloss.

Not really. There's still a ton to be learned on things that have already been found. Plus, we're learning how wrong we've been on a lot of stuff, too. For instance, the Victorian idea of history is so far removed from the reality that's it's laughable. And yet, we still use and teach the Victorian history lessons over and over again. Why? Most people didn't see a need to review a lot of the stuff that was done then. In the last 20 years, though, historians and archeologists have reviewed and re-studied a lot of medieval and renaissance books, extant items, etc., and found out a lot of things that we didn't know before.

For instance, Victorian historians believed that there wasn't much of a difference in style, clothing, and personal care between when the Romans left England and when William the Conqueror came. To them, time pretty much stopped in the UK. We now know that that's completely false. Trade continued, there was a constant change in demographics throughout that period, and that affected every aspect of daily life.

On top of that, the use of experimental archeology has shown that what was once believed to be true (like how plows were made and worked in 1100 CE) can't be. Historians and archeologistst are recreating those items and trying them out, only to find that they were completely wrong on a lot of stuff. It's really fascinating to read about these things.

[Jacob]

I was thinking the other day that the problem with history is that undiscovered stuff is running out.  Everything now is just a gloss on a gloss on a gloss.

I don't think so at all - there are tons of things that we don't know about the past, there are many new ways to look at the evidence we have no, and there are plenty of our current interpretations of the past that are based on just-so stories ripe for rigorous analysis.

[Admiral Yi]

Let me clarify.  Traditional history has been about reading and analyzing original documents.  That is pretty much wrapped up.  What are left are the overlapping/competing fields of archeology and anthropology.

[merithyn]

Let me clarify.  Traditional history has been about reading and analyzing original documents.  That is pretty much wrapped up.  What are left are the overlapping/competing fields of archeology and anthropology.

Even that's not entirely true. New evidence goes a long way toward changing how we analyze and read original documents.

[mongers]

Is this a second Bachelor's for you, Valmy?

Yep.  Somehow that history degree was not propelling me forward in the work force.

You know, I ran into the same problem! Who knew?! 

I knew.   

Despite being a big history nerd, I knew a history degree would be fairly useless...

So now you're doomed to repeat yourself.