You've got a point, Rox, although (as you said) we need to be careful about making generalizations. A note from personal experience: I used to manage a commercial bank data center, and many of the best programmers I hired came from 2- and 4-year programs in business information systems rather than pure CS. But then again, we didn't get too many job applications from folks with pure CS degrees, either.

Having said that, I'll confess to having a 4-yr Math/CS education with an MBA tossed in for good measure. From my own experience, which is mostly in developing business applications, I have often felt it was helpful to know something about the theory behind all of this stuff. But I would agree with you that the typical 4-yr CS degree is not necessarily the best preparation for someone wanting to do business application development. Certainly, as is evidenced in this thread, many excellent developers don't have, and don't need, the 4-yr sheepskin.

As for FoxPro, it's always been by far the best PC application development tool for data-based apps. After spending years working in an environment where we had to roll our own data and index structures, and code the corresponding data access and update methods, the xBase paradigm was a joy to discover. Imagine, the data structure definition was actually encapsulated in the file! And you could add a field without first recompiling every program that accessed that file! Wow. I was hooked.

As you say, to be any good at this you gotta love it, but fortunately that's easy to do.

Rick

>>>I have my own theory about 4-year C.S. grads in this field if your interested... sorta related to your original question and sorta not related...
>>
>>Is it similar to the one expressed by Mike Helland? Shoot away with the theory (be gentle I am a 4 year CS grade). :-)
>
>Ok, all you 4 yr CS grads brace yourself... this is going to sound like a blanket statement but I don't mean it to be. Just my personal observation about the tendency among 4 CS grads that I've gotten know as peers in the software development field in general.
>
>4 yr CS grads usually dont make good business application programmers. Why? Well I think it's not because of skill or ability but rather because of mindset. Folks like me with an IS related business degree (CIS, MIS, and I even seen BMIS flavor) come out of school expecting to work on strictly business apps in the business world. Folks with the 4 yr CS degree often tell me "I never expected to do ______ "(basically business app software but said in different ways). The CS grads seem to have a mindset better suited to system level programming (like interfacing with hardware or closer to the op sys level) And when I do run into a 4 yr CS grad who is great at producing business apps, they don't seem to stay at that level for more than 5-6 years. Then they tend to move into higher end database platforms (Oracle, SQL Server) or at the least they go to C++ to get closer to system level programming. And for the most part, granted I know exceptions to everything I'm saying here, but for the
>most part 4 yr CS grads who dont move into something other than business app programming are usually miserable to work with.
>
>Now to tie this back to the original subject, my theory on 4 yr CS grads seems to make sense in relation to FoxPro. The FoxPro language is way more extensive than it's evil cousin VB (duck). And it's way more involved to work with, so your CS grad who never really expected to do business apps in college would need a lot more dedication and attention span than the average geek-wanna-be. Plus too, to excel with FoxPro you gotta really be into meeting challenging requirements and conquering a powerful tool, so you gotta love doing business apps.