Increasing traffic on PGD...

[LP]

That's incorrect, f.i. see http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudi...eveloper-tools

Seems like they provide Windows Phone SDK separately. I stand corrected.

Well, I've met enough "professionally certified" personnel to take those with a truckload of salt, especially when they're from a pure academic background, and I've met quite few. ;-)

Not everyone can teach and those who can teach may not necessarily be good professionals to work for industry. Teaching is not as easy as you may think and there are even professional degrees (e.g. Bachelor/Master/Doctor of Education), which are required in many cases to give classes to children, for instance. The same applies to scientific works as the scientific approach might be different than a purely mechanical work, which is very common when working in companies (ranging from software engineering to top management positions). Perhaps you can't understand it because you have not done any scientific work and/or teaching yourself, but I'm just guessing.

I guess you skipped the part on me saying I already have quite a high degree, and got it, hmmm, almost 15 years ago. So what I'm referring to is mostly what I get from new hires & interns.

No, I saw it but you are moving conversation to a personal level. What you have mentioned is an equivalent of baechelor/undergraduate degree (roughly 4/5-year university education), which is a minimal degree required by most institutions. You should note that you are not allowed to give classes with this degree, nor do any scientific work in "traditional" universities/research centers, which sort of proves my point above. If you wish to pursue this conversation further, I'd like to point out the classical Unskilled and unaware of it article, which you should read first. Please note that I'm not trying to be disrespectful, I believe that degree itself is not everything: education, experience and even personality/attitude are very important factors as well.

(edit) By the way, for comparison, here in Mexico to be *paid* to do research, you need 12 years of university education (5 bachelor + 2 master + 5 doctorate) plus 2 years of professional practice (e.g. postdoctoral stay, which must be done at least in a different state where you have got doctoral degree). To be able to teach lower degrees, you need Master's degree and 1 year of practice. This is somewhat similar to U.S., Canada and EU.

Edit 2:

I guess we have a major incomprehension here, I'm not a student, and many PGD visitors aren't and won't be. They won't be going back to university full-time, and even part-time university can be quite problematic when you have a full-time job already and children.

You are wrong. As I've said before, in M.Sc. and D.Sc. degrees that I took most people had families with children and were working either full or part time. Actually, in my own case (similar to some of my classmates), I got paid to do research in my D.Sc. degree both by institution and by Mexican's council of sciences and technology and the payment was pretty good! In fact, the payment may be even higher than what you receive while working in a company! These degrees give you more labor opportunities and sometimes change your way of thinking, which you may not acquire in your entire life with experience only. This is why I recommend for everyone who want to push farther in their career and life to take one of more advanced degrees and it is never too late to do so.

Yes, it really depends on the institution and indeed some may excel in some things, while other institutions may excel in other stuff, but you can choose even on international scale and pick what you want.

P.S. Jason, sorry for this sort of hijacking, but after all it's a discussion about programming skills taught in institutions as opposed to teaching them here on PGD, so it's somewhat related to topic.

[Eric]

You should note that you are not allowed to give classes with this degree, nor do any scientific work in "traditional" universities/research centers

Actually, I am. :-) Though I've checked "Bachelor", that's two years less than I have, and a university degree. In France we have a system of "Grandes Ecoles" which runs in parallel to universities degrees aren't directly comparable to university degrees (it's another french historical oddity).

Anyway that's besides the point.

To get back on topic, I agree with the suggestions you made earlier.

1) 64-bit development and performance (I've opened the thread about it: no interest).
2) DirectX: nobody cares here because OpenGL is the only way to go for Unix/Mac OS guys, who are the majority here.
3) Mac OS specifics: there was some discussion in Delphi XE 2 news thread with Czar and me, but that's all.
4) iOS specifics: how to use sensors, compass, magnetometer, etc. There are random threads on Embarcadero forums, but I would like to see this material *here*.
5) Databases, networking, multiplayer in Delphi.
6) Publishing of Delphi made iOS apps and publishing in general.
7) Performance optimizations in 64-bit inline assembly in Delphi.
Math materials (libraries, code snippets, etc.)

To me 2, 3 and 4 are specs/docs material subjects, 1 and 7 are about programming in general (choosing the appropriate algorithm, profiling), 5 and 8 is what academic material is about (except multi-player), 6 is what WILL already does.

So all in all, they mostly fall into teaching programming from a gaming POV, and that's IMHO a good angle for PGD. What I disagreed with was

Actually I think teaching programming by itself is not a very useful tactic here because newbies have many options to choose from: C# and XNA, C/C++, Perl, Python, Lua, Java and so on.

When someone needs to do something, he'll use the tool for which material specific to his needs is available.
If all the material assumes you're already a Pascal pro, then you certainly won't be attracting any Pascal newcomers.

[LP]

Actually, I am. :-) Though I've checked "Bachelor", that's two years less than I have, and a university degree. In France we have a system of "Grandes Ecoles" which runs in parallel to universities degrees aren't directly comparable to university degrees (it's another french historical oddity).

Yes, but in France you have also additional degrees such as "Professor", which require even more time to get. However, translating these degrees to other countries is difficult and you may still need to take additional degrees to be able to give courses. This was the case of my brother as Doctoral degree in Ukraine is higher than Ph.D. yet he still had to do 2 postdoctoral stays (4 years total) before being able to do the research.

When someone needs to do something, he'll use the tool for which material specific to his needs is available.
If all the material assumes you're already a Pascal pro, then you certainly won't be attracting any Pascal newcomers.

You are repeating the mocking fallacy. I've never said to assume on PGD that visitors are Pascal "pro"s as you have put it. I suggested to assume some basic knowledge and as you have quoted my first posts, I've actually suggested some educational material with some specifics that not everyone may be aware of.

For instance, I agree that FlipCode had some very interesting stuff and in fact I've implemented some of it in Asphyre. Specifically, I think it will be very cool to have a specialized section here on PGD, which deals with issues such as: 1) calculating square root using pure integer math, 2) search algorithms (this is a general category, path-finding is a special case), 3) fixed-point math (not everyone is yet aware of its usefulness), etc.

Edit: I think Multi-threading Tutorial on PGD by Athena is an interesting topic, but instead of long discussion I would put some rudimentary code to illustrate how threads can be created and used, instead of arguing why they are useful.

[Eric]

> 1) calculating square root using pure integer math

Also introducing approaches where sqrt becomes unnecessary, the fastest sqrt is the one you don't do!

> 2) search algorithms (this is a general category, path-finding is a special case)

That is a good subject indeed, mostly when dealing with pathfinding in something else than a grid.

> 3) fixed-point math (not everyone is yet aware of its usefulness), etc.

More of a micro-optimization issue, was relevant in the days of software graphics, though still occasionally useful in shaders.

On the same subject, articles on usage of floating point in situations where finite or exact precision is required would be quite relevant these days.

On AI aspects, there are two subjects I rarely see mentioned, but often (mis)used, usually by people who don't know they're using them:
- PID controllers, and the way to "fuzzy" them to make them look like natural behavior
- introduction of delays and phase tricks in algorithms to simulate natural behavior
- decision and action trees, or how to get interesting behavior in complex simulated words where direct approaches are not practical
which could make good articles I guess (the theory behind them is light, they're more about applying simple concepts from a different perspective)