>. Yeah, you're right, I'd say she never took Programming 101. Just curious, was that analysis from part of that "wild imagination" of which you previously spoke? :)
>>
>>The deciders of lifetime achievement awards in FoxPro are an incestuous little club. I say that even though I admire and like most of them on an individual basis. I still wonder whether Marcia ever had a formal comp sci education. You can go a long way in this little corner of the world by pushing yourself as a brand name. As you well know.
>
>I'd really like for you to expand on that last sentence.
>
>And Mike - I know MANY successful developers (myself included) who have degrees in other areas.

Sure there are, but I also know programmers who have degrees in other areas that suck or are average at best.
All I can tell is that I though at age 18, written articles for magazines since I was 16, that I was an excellent programmer, that was until I went to university and quickly realised that though I was able to understand and solve complex problems, that creating a good software solution is something of a different nature.

After I got my degree a went independed and was a FP/VFP programmer for years, had my own software company and thought I could do it all, another programmer went by and let me see that though I was able to understand and solve complex problems, my programs were lacking readability, OO Design and maintenance.

I now spend way more time, not to make things work, but apply decent OO strategies, produce readable and maintainable code and write documentation.
Now I think I'm a decent developper, but I have no doubt that some day someone walks in and tells me: Mr Meester, your software sucks because of this and that (Based upon valid arguments, as opposed to empty statements like VFP sucks and .NET best :) ).

All I can say is that targeted education does matter. It hurts when I speak to IT professionals that do not have a concept of what a database is, do not know that a byte consists out of 8 bits, confuse Mbps with MBps, do not understand the concept of NULL, do not know the difference between black box and white box testing and worse do not look beyond the horizon of where the technology is heading towards.