"So it's clear that to be an effective programmer, you need to be well-versed in both the practical and academic aspects of the field. Dismissing the practical aspects by saying they are a waste of time and that some dude from a trade school can handle them for you is ... short-sighted."
That's not what I said, though. My opinion is that if you want to have longevity in your career, you need to focus on the theory. That doesn't mean that you don't learn the other stuff -- you just learn what's necessary, and move on. More to the point: when you're spending big bucks on college classes, you'd better be devoting your time to learning stuff that you can't learn from a few hours of quality time in a coffee shop with an O'Reilly book and a laptop.
For what it's worth, though, I've known many CS professors, and many industry programmers, and I wouldn't put the average of one group ahead of the other in terms of programming skill. The myth that academics don't know "industry" is a myth (but there are plenty of coders who don't know anything about algorithms).
Also for the record: I like Perl. I'm not the one calling it a dinosaur technology. I also like C++, though, so maybe I'm just old.
Why can't you learn data structures from a book in a coffee shop? I did.
I would argue that you can't learn the theory until you have enough practical experience to actually implement and play with the theoretical concepts you are learning about. By not learning "the trivial stuff you can learn from an Oreilly book in a coffee shop", you are wasting your on time. The sooner you stop wasting your own time, the less of it you will waste.
That's not what I said, though. My opinion is that if you want to have longevity in your career, you need to focus on the theory. That doesn't mean that you don't learn the other stuff -- you just learn what's necessary, and move on. More to the point: when you're spending big bucks on college classes, you'd better be devoting your time to learning stuff that you can't learn from a few hours of quality time in a coffee shop with an O'Reilly book and a laptop.
For what it's worth, though, I've known many CS professors, and many industry programmers, and I wouldn't put the average of one group ahead of the other in terms of programming skill. The myth that academics don't know "industry" is a myth (but there are plenty of coders who don't know anything about algorithms).
Also for the record: I like Perl. I'm not the one calling it a dinosaur technology. I also like C++, though, so maybe I'm just old.