This morning I went to Phil Windley’s CTO Breakfast. Phil Windley is a BYU computer science professor and former CTO for the State of Utah, and every month he holds an “informal gathering of technologists”. Today’s attendees included two other BYU professors, a state representative, and several other programmers and technologists young and old. This was the second CTO Breakfast I’ve attended, and like last time, the conversation just flowed from one topic to the next without much structure as we sat around a conference table. Here are some of the interesting points:

• We talked about education in the U.S. — that incentives for excelling in school are poor, school isn’t “cool”, and the country generally doesn’t choose role models because of their brains, hard work, or excellence in school. Related to education, someone mentioned a study in which one group of students ate beans and toast for breakfast and performed much better in school than the other group which had sweetened cereal and other sugary foods for breakfast. The same study was also mentioned in a New Scientist article I saw yesterday. Very interesting.
• We talked a lot about computer languages. There are hundreds of computer languages. Programmers often choose the language they know best or the tool that will get the job done the fastest or easiest, even if it’s not the “best” language. Phil programs in Scheme because he thinks it’s one of the “best” languages. There are lots of similarities between computer programming languages and human languages: some have lots of characters, are harder to learn, and can say a lot with not a lot of writing (Chinese and APL) while other languages have fewer characters, are easier to learn, and require more writing to say the same thing (English and C++).
• We live in an increasingly complex world — no matter how you abstract it, complexity is always complex. There’s no shortcut to abstracting complexity.
• The incentive system for our teachers is poor. Someone mentioned having a high school teacher that made math fun, which caused him to take interest in math, enjoy math, excel in math, and go on to a degree and a career in engineering and computers. That teacher was excellent, but perhaps not the norm. Teachers are paid based on degrees and years of experience rather than performance, which is a shame both for the bad teachers and the good teachers. It causes bad teachers to feel complacent and causes good teachers to burn out.
• Someone mentioned, and a few agreed, that grades in college don’t matter “above a B” — coming from a room full of academics (professors, grad students, etc.) What a different mindset from mine: grades in college don’t matter, period. OK, let me qualify that a little bit — grades do matter for grad school, I suppose, and they matter if you want to get a job with a prestigious consulting firm. But for most jobs, grades don’t matter at all, and they especially don’t matter if you want to be entrepreneurial. They might even hurt. I recently listened to the audio version of The Millionaire Mind. It mentioned that a lot of millionaire businessmen don’t fit the mold of school and perform poorly. Also, some students that do poorly in school are forced to take the “harder” jobs in sales and are forced to develop people skills and managerial skils because they can’t ride on their grades. Those differences cause them to excel at entrepreneurship and in business.
• And the joke from today’s CTO breakfast: Phil said, half-jokingly, “If the questions you search for on Google don’t return any answers, you may be on the cutting edge of technology!” Someone laughed that, yes, if Google doesn’t return any answers to your questions, you’re definitely on one extreme of the bell curve or the other.