If you don't already have one, implementing a help desk system can relieve some of the problems. If someone is giving you flak about not getting immediate attention, you can always show them your help desk queue and how many hours are being spent on other people's work.
It's easier to explain to people why they have to wait when they can see how long the line is.
If you haven't looked at help desk packages, my company offers a web-hosted version that can be implmented quickly and cheaply.
www.dhk.com
For more details, please call the phone number on the web page.
While this langauage has been implemented...MIT's Scheme is pretty close to a programming language that will never be used in the real world. I thought that it was an excellent way to learn programming outside of the other more practiced languages.
There are two problems with his arguments.
1) It doesn't matter if schools press for their students to push their knowledge outside of their comfort zone. There are a wide range of educational offerings available from community colleges to private Unviersities. Students usually try to select their educational challenge based on a wide variety of factors. Prof. Dykstra discussed that the universities should push the students beyond their comfort zone into these radical novelties. Maybe he was teaching at the wrong school. Or maybe he was compelled by his department to dumb down his curicula, but I seriously doubt that every CS department tries to dumb down their education the way he described. The free market let's students decide the type of education they would like. If they want a CS challenge, there are plenty of offerings out there.
2) Not all people are as smart as Prof. Dykstra would like them to be. Even if you found a person with an 100 IQ that was interested in learning higher level abstract mathematics and their application to programming, that person would not be suitable for this education. Most people are very capable of self determining the maximum level of intellectual challenge they are up for. Even if they can't afford to go to some of the more expensive private universities, someone that is very intellictually capabale but financially challenged should have a very wide variety of resources available, including unviersity course access via the Internet.
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If you don't already have one, implementing a help desk system can relieve some of the problems. If someone is giving you flak about not getting immediate attention, you can always show them your help desk queue and how many hours are being spent on other people's work. It's easier to explain to people why they have to wait when they can see how long the line is. If you haven't looked at help desk packages, my company offers a web-hosted version that can be implmented quickly and cheaply. www.dhk.com For more details, please call the phone number on the web page.
While this langauage has been implemented...MIT's Scheme is pretty close to a programming language that will never be used in the real world. I thought that it was an excellent way to learn programming outside of the other more practiced languages. There are two problems with his arguments. 1) It doesn't matter if schools press for their students to push their knowledge outside of their comfort zone. There are a wide range of educational offerings available from community colleges to private Unviersities. Students usually try to select their educational challenge based on a wide variety of factors. Prof. Dykstra discussed that the universities should push the students beyond their comfort zone into these radical novelties. Maybe he was teaching at the wrong school. Or maybe he was compelled by his department to dumb down his curicula, but I seriously doubt that every CS department tries to dumb down their education the way he described. The free market let's students decide the type of education they would like. If they want a CS challenge, there are plenty of offerings out there. 2) Not all people are as smart as Prof. Dykstra would like them to be. Even if you found a person with an 100 IQ that was interested in learning higher level abstract mathematics and their application to programming, that person would not be suitable for this education. Most people are very capable of self determining the maximum level of intellectual challenge they are up for. Even if they can't afford to go to some of the more expensive private universities, someone that is very intellictually capabale but financially challenged should have a very wide variety of resources available, including unviersity course access via the Internet.