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I don't understand how the contrast -- using category theory to derive notions of computation and something attempting to patch up Perl's object system -- relat

I don't understand how the contrast -- using category theory to derive notions of computation and something attempting to patch up Perl's object system -- relates to the rest of the essay. I don't mean to be coy, but what's the point? Is it that business skills are important, too, and that universities (and their CS departments in particular) are underserving the computing industry? That's what one of the comments (http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?sid=42485&cid=67709 http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?sid=42485&cid=67709) seems to indicate. The American education system needs some work, but I think it's a mistake to see a university education as vocational training: the "fields" in a university don't correspond to "fields" in the world. It's a coincidence that computer science roughly corresponds to a field in high demand these days.

sketerpot 18y ago
I agree that university education shouldn't be vocational training, but CS graduates need good programming skills. Computer science is very useful stuff, with a lot of applications in the Real World, and just because there are subfields in CS that don't have any obvious application, that doesn't mean that CS folks shouldn't at least try to be useful. Have a look sometime at Simon Peyton-Jones' Haskell-related papers: they're pretty far removed from grunting-in-the-dirt Java monkeying or hacking up a quick Perl script, but they're very readable, and someone who knows Haskell can generally see the usefulness of them on the very first page. (Also, CS people should be comfortable slinging code around. Some would argue this point, but having decent programming skills makes anybody whose work involves computers much more effective. Ideological purity be damned.)