UNIX history made easy

[gwyn at BRL.MIL]

In article <1218 at skye.ed.ac.uk>, richard at aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) writes:
> In article <11239 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
> >The point is, if you don't know who Backus, Dijkstra, Hoare, Knuth,
> >Thompson, Wirth, etc. are and what their major accomplishments were,
> >you shouldn't advertise yourself as a professional computer scientist.
> You certainly shouldn't call yourself a computer scientist if you don't
> understand the major principles expounded by these people, but to
> believe that knowledge of the people is important smacks of episodism.

I was assuming that familiarity with the ideas would best be acquired by
reading the original writings, or that if secondary sources were used at
least they would have given proper credit to the originators of the ideas.
Personally I find original sources to usually be much clearer and
more inspiring than rehashes found in textbooks.

I think professionalism is more a matter of attitude than anything else.
I read what these men had to say, without any school prompting me (in
fact, there was no discipline called "computer science" when I started to
study it).  That's because these were interesting and important ideas,
and as a professional I care about ideas.