My 7th and 8th grade shop class in the early '60s was a great learning experience. I think I learned more geometry and trig there than in math class. At least m

My 7th and 8th grade shop class in the early '60s was a great learning experience. I think I learned more geometry and trig there than in math class. At least more about their practical application. Of course I found it especially cool because I was shop foreman both years - which meant I got to direct the cleanup at the end of class instead of having to do the cleanup! The first semester was mechanical drawing, and the second was using the power tools and building whatever we'd designed in the first semester. Whoever scored highest in mechanical drawing would be shop foreman. It was pretty awesome getting to use drill presses and bandsaws and lathes and all that good stuff as an 11-12 year old. We did use eye protection, unlike my third grade "special ed for smart and restless kids" class where I told the teacher I wanted to etch a printed circuit board and I needed a tank of nitric acid to do it, and she got it for me! No eye protection back then, I just got to watch the copper dissolve away. (And fortunately, not my eyes.) Anyway, I think I may have won the shop foreman job because I took great care in erasing cleanly. When you're doing mechanical drawing with pencil and paper and compass and protractor and a French curve and straightedge, a good eraser and that little metal erasing shield are your best friends: https://www.google.com/search?q=erasing+shield&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=erasing+shield&tbm=isch That interest in whitespace seems to have carried over into my programming career. I'm a bit saddened by today's popular wisdom that says it really doesn't matter what the whitespace conventions in your code are, as long as you pick some standard and make everyone stick to it now and forever, and if you don't like something about the standard you're just bikeshedding. I've had the good fortune to mostly work on teams that simply didn't have whitespace standards, so I got to see a variety of styles and learn from them all - which ones helped communicate the structure and meaning of the code, and which ones maybe less so. And also that it really isn't that hard to read code where one person's work has minor variations in spacing from another's. If I'd been locked into rigid standards all along, I don't know if I would have had the chance to learn any of this. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about sloppy indentation! You gotta get that right. ;-)