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Comment by chimi | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of people, especially around here, eschew college education in the computer sciences, because you can get a job without it and you can build a website without it, but I really think the decline of formal education in computer programming concepts has led to a lack of cathedral thinking.

Of course, I'm biased, because I have such a degree. However, when I compare what I build to what is built by a business school grad who thinks anyone can learn computers, so everyone should be taught business, I really cringe at loss of formality in the industry.

Needing to build a computer processor from AND and OR gates really drives the concepts home. Building an operating system in C++ really drives the concepts home and creates a framework for thinking about computer based problem solving that's lost in many of the systems I look at today.

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I'm going to go ahead and strongly disagree on this first point -- I've seen no correlation whatsoever between education background and propensity for strong system design. In fact, my background is mathematics with very little formal CS-related education and I'm firmly in the cathedral camp.

I really think it is a matter of exposure -- at one time all anyone ever saw were cathedrals, and so that was all anyone ever built. I feel now we've swung too far the other way, where there are many in the craft who've never seen a cathedral and have only known the bazaars. The reality is we need both, and the craft of building cathedrals is becoming endangered.

my background is mathematics

You are a terrible example because you come from a formal background of a hard science. Even worse, you come from one where proofs (the cathedral in the mathematics sense) are required or you aren't taken seriously.

The parent was talking about joe schmo off the street or the high school wunderkind who is building "twitter for teens" or "pinterest for social good". They are just slapping it together from the get go without thinking about any aspect of the design. Eventually they'll have to hire the formally schooled to come in and clean it all up, if they actually get anywhere with it.

Which makes me wonder, if more formally educated individuals were in the start up game would the failure rate be so high as it is now?

The startup game has tons of formally educated people, and their failure rate is just as spectacularly high, if not higher. In my experience, the formally educated tend to build "science projects" at a higher rate than businesses, when compared to those building "twitter for teens"

their failure rate is just as spectacularly high, if not higher

I asked a question, you are making a statement. If you have numbers that prove that the formally educated are failing more then I think we'd all love to see them. Otherwise, this is just conjecture.

As for 'science projects' failing it could be a number of things. I would assume that hard science startups fail a lot of the time because of cost. "Twitter for teens" is much cheaper to start than one doing alternative energy. Also, hard science is less sexy than a lot of the social stuff that currently dominates the landscape. Thusly, it can be much more difficult to find the money you need due to visibility. The social startups will probably pay out sooner than long-tail hard science companies.

"proofs (the cathedral in the mathematics sense)"

Uh, we are talking about the same Cathedral and Bazaar thing here, right? Cathedral in the sense that only the anointed master architects get to make decisions; everyone else does what they're told and keeps their mouths shut; bazaar in the sense that everybody brings whatever they've got and hopefully the good stuff hangs around?

Huh? No, Cathedral in the sense that:

Everyone brings whatever they've got, and the anointed master architects sift through it, determine the best course of action, redirect known-bad avenues of exploration and possibly anoint new master architects from the best of the candidates.

I'm not I'd like to get on either side of this argument, but I'd like to point out a steady decline in systems and operating systems (both research and teaching) across the academic world. Rob Pike wrote a polemic touching on it, and he wasn't entirely off base.

This isn't to say that they don't exist, but there are a wealth of examples demonstrating the transition of major progress in those fields to companies like Google and Amazon. For anecdotal examples, see GFS, MapReduce, and Dynamo; there are many unpublished/trade-secret examples that will take years to come out.

Additionally, many schools have reduced their requirements for what exposure students should have to systems and OS:

A Harvard CS concentrator, for example, is not required to take either the introductory systems or operating systems classes; he/she may opt to take a high-level mobile programming class instead. Indeed, the operating systems and distributed systems courses are taught every other year, further reducing enrollment. The last time CS 161 (intro OS) was taught, there were only 23 students. 25 in CS 153 (Compilers). This is a stark contrast to the 100-200 students who took other upper-level CS classes (189 in mobile, for example).

While I will not contest the value of the formal CS education, I see some of the 'naive'(for lack of a better term) CS proliferating even there.

Please, what was Rob Pike's polemic? Can you share a link?

From googling around, might you be referring to:

"Systems Software Research Is Irrelevant"

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/

And there's a little slashdot discussion:

http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pi...

That's the one, though I prefer this format: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf

I don't agree strictly with everything he says. It is a polemic rather than a careful argument. But still, he has a point and the data about OS research is strong (even beyond his data).

I suspect that "a lack of cathedral thinking" has absolutely nothing to do with the quality or lack thereof of modern systems. I've seen both well- and poorly-built results from bazaar-like development approaches, and well- and poorly-built results from cathedral-like approaches.

Of course, I may be biased because I've seen more poorly-built results from cathedral approaches.

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