Best Computer Science School in Utah

[Nicholas Leippe]

On Wednesday 26 September 2007, Levi Pearson wrote:
> The point is, someone had to study the theory in order to design the
> procedure to be as safe and effective as possble.  In reality, we make
> all surgeons do that kind of study.  I certainly think that's a good
> thing, even though they might not all really need it in their
> day-to-day operations.

Furthermore, if someone is merely skilled in practicing a procedure they 
learned from someone else who developed it out of an understanding of the 
theory, they will have an insufficient knowledge to figure out "why" when 
something doesn't work as expected.  Miss an important stitch and they may 
not understand enough to diagnose the resulting symptoms back to the missing 
stitch.  Mess up using a deterministic, fixed locking sequence and not be 
able to figure out what is causing the intermittent deadlocks. I'm sure you 
can think of other examples.

IMO, divorcing practice entirely from understanding the theory may work in 
some fields, but not effectively for surgery nor for programming.