[Techtalk] Theory vs. practice

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 04:42:40PM -0700 or thereabouts, Val Henson wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 06:32:14PM -0500, Malcolm& wrote:
> > 
> > That's just plain scary. It explains some of the people I run into
> > (I had someone complain about me using "big words" recently when asking
> > what the options for doing some code migration were. I didn't know
> > 'refactoring' was a big word).
> 
> I have you beat.  A recent thread about preemptive kernels on
> linux-kernel included several people who dismissed the problem of
> priority inversion as "blowing smoke" and "not a big deal."
> 
> Of course, many participants in Linux kernel development don't have a
> college education that you could blame for their ignorance.  Is the
> bitterness showing through yet? :)

I have absolutely no idea of what priority inversion is. But on the
matter of kernel developers, there was an interesting study some
time ago which looked at the "they're all college kids" and "they
have no professional experience" beliefs, and found it far less
true than you might think. 

  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=2931

That's from almost exactly three years ago, so things might have
changed. 

Oddly enough, a friend on IRC was lamenting the decline of maths
today. "How can you think you can program if you can't understand
mathematics?" sort of thing. Not being a programmer, I wouldn't
know. :) 

Telsa