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From: mark@tove.UUCP (Mark Weiser)
Newsgroups: net.cse
Subject: Re: Where have all the hackers gone?
Message-ID: <67@tove.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 11-Dec-84 23:26:11 EST
Article-I.D.: tove.67
Posted: Tue Dec 11 23:26:11 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Dec-84 02:25:00 EST
References: <3137@utah-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: mark@tove.UUCP (Mark Weiser)
Organization: U of Maryland, Laboratory for Parallel Computation, C.P., MD
Lines: 23

With regard to Eric Brown's lament, and query regarding backwater
Universities which still allow undergraduates to hack rather
than homogenizing them all with "weed-out" courses:

Here at Maryland I have observed two kinds of hackers:
The first kind is the A student who also loves computers.  This
is by far the more common kind of hacker, and this person
is not weeded out at all.  (Yes, we have those weed-out courses here.
They are necessary).  We try to identify the A student hacker early
on and get them into our research lab where they can play usefully.

The second kind of hacker differs from the first only in lack of
discipline, not in smarts, but the effect is that they barely
make it through their courses, if it all.  They do get weeded out
often, but we also try to get these people into our lab if they are
super enough.  But these people SHOULD be weeded out: self discipline
is a necessary skill in all of life.


-- 
Spoken: Mark Weiser 	ARPA:	mark@maryland	Phone: (301) 454-7817
CSNet:	mark@umcp-cs 	UUCP:	{seismo,allegra}!umcp-cs!mark
USPS: Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742