> This is in a long tradition of English neglect, ultimately traceable to Heaviside's status as a commoner This is unfair on the English. Glancing at their wi

> This is in a long tradition of English neglect, ultimately traceable to Heaviside's status as a commoner This is unfair on the English. Glancing at their wikipedia entries, Heavyside doesn't seem any more common than [Dirac][1] or [Faraday][2]. If I had to guess at a sociological reason why Heavyside got ignored, it's that he got caught in the transition when people started learning engineering through universities rather than apprenticeships. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac#Early_years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac#Early_years [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday#Early_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday#Early_life Heavyside's uncle Charles Wheatstone was a tradie who never went to unversity, but got knighted for services to electrical engineering. Faraday was another tradie who joined the Royal Society eight years before he got an (honorary) university degree. But in a later age Dirac became a world famous scientist, but would probably have gone nowhere if he hadn't got a scholarship to study electrical engineering at a university. We can't wag our finger at Victorian English society for a the sin of credentialism when our own society does it much more vigorously. It's especially for our own profession, as programming is much more a craft than a thing you can learn at university.