>Evan and John,
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>PMFJI. To my admittedly snobbish way of thinking, a degree indicates you've learned to think somehow. Therefore there cannot be a degree in Fox, VB, or any other "mere product."
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>When I was in high school we were taught structured programming (a hot new idea then <s>) using Pascal. The teacher claimed we might never use Pascal again, but he didn't care about whether we could learn syntax, he wanted us to learn structure. IOW, he wanted us to learn to think.
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>I responsed to John's message instead of the others because John brings up the real point. You can't finish a project in VFP unless you know what you're doing, you have to be able to consider the general case, plan for the future, etc. That makes VFP programmers among some of the most advanced I've ever known.
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>We are hiring a junior programmer right now and all of those graduates who claim they went to college to learn Visual Basic go right into the circular file. We don't want Fox per se, but we know anyone who knows OOP, structure, and the relational model can pick up the syntax.
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>My own degree is in Physics. Like math, it teaches you general thinking and has served me well as an background for programming.

Right so. The degree should give you (at least in, as we call 'em here, natural sciences, i.e. maths, physics etc) the ability to think, to think abstractly, and to wonder why. It makes for a much more usable coder, who not only knows which sort of control to apply for a particular case, and which properties to change from default, but knows how it should work, what side effects it may have etc - before touching the mouse. Or the guy who can see the data laid out before creating a single table.

I'm not saying you can't get it from a high school guy - some of them are real talents, have well oiled logic and insight - but the chances are you will get it from a guy with a degree are substantially higher, and a chance to stumble upon a graduate moron are equally lower.

Just for Evan's statistics: my official title is "graduated mathematician", which is equal to a BS. I'm not sure I'm still entitled to that - I'd rather define myself as a coder with mathematical backgrounds.