I learned the nuts and bolts of engineering on the job, and from reading the (absolutely delightful) Boeing design manuals, where they distilled the lore of how to design airliners in a series of manuals.
But in my long career, I've never encountered anyone who learned math on the job.
Math was my superpower at work.
But since I was not a CS major, I never properly learned the academic side of CS. I run into this deficit now and then, and I'm not proud of it. Andrei Alexandrescu joined me on the D project, and had the academic chops, which was greatly appreciated by me.
> But since I was not a CS major, I never properly learned the academic side of CS.
Would you have been a CS major if that had been an option at Caltech?
For everyone wondering why CS would not have been an option, at the time Walter was at Caltech they didn't offer CS as an undergraduate major. They did have a CS department which did offer some undergraduate CS classes but it only offered graduate degrees. Undergraduates interested in CS typically majored in math or physics or engineering and took the undergraduate CS courses in addition to the coursework of their major.
I don't remember when they started offering an undergraduate CS degree. I think it was not too long after I graduated (class of '82), which was a couple years or so behind Walter.
> Would you have been a CS major if that had been an option at Caltech?
No. I wanted to design airplanes, jet engines, rockets, etc. I had a secondary interest in electronics, and a tertiary one in programming. I wasn't that interested in the academic side of computing.
By way of context, at MIT (which I'm much more familiar with), there was effectively a CS major out of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, but there weren't PCs and computing was pretty much limited to Multics in the AI lab. (There was a mainframe with punch cards that you could get a limited account for using with the other branches of engineering. I took a Fortran course then I don't think I touched a computer for the rest of my time as an undergrad.)
There wasn't widespread access to computers at MIT until Project Athena. So CS was historically mostly not hands on. And that's somewhere where CS was in the engineering school. At many schools, it was part of the math department.
So, there's a strong academic tradition of CS being more about math than programming. Even the current CS intro course at MIT is mostly about algorithms and you're pretty much expected to pick up Python on your own.
But in my long career, I've never encountered anyone who learned math on the job.
Math was my superpower at work.
But since I was not a CS major, I never properly learned the academic side of CS. I run into this deficit now and then, and I'm not proud of it. Andrei Alexandrescu joined me on the D project, and had the academic chops, which was greatly appreciated by me.