> sullying their minds with real world `wrong ways' and more practical concerns
Why do computers exist, and why do people study them? Because they're very useful for "practical concerns". Practical concerns should be at the heart of any study of computers and computation; it's impractical for them not to be.
I'm not sure I agree -- it's my experience that too often `practical concerns' become an excuse to teach faddish details of what is being done in the `real world' now, instead of provide any sense of the parts of the field which don't change with each new technology.
I'd rather teach a new hire who had worked through a curriculum built around SICP[1] or HtDP[2] the languages and technologies we actually use here -- even though we never write a line of scheme -- then teach a student who got a four year `Computer Science' education focused on the details of a particular programming language or technology stack how to use that very stack to accomplish lasting things...
This is a false dichotomy. I would rather a student who had gotten a coherent CS education in some random Algol-descended language who had worked on a curriculum consisting of a great big chunk of algorithms, systems work (os, compilers, networks) and architecture.
I am finding many "high-church-of-X" approaches to CS increasingly unsatisfying, whether it's rabid OO, the rabid 'functional programming solves all problems', Stephanov's 'grind away for 6-12 months putting the basics on a RIGOROUS FOUNDATION without solving a single interesting problem' book, etc...
My feeling is that many of these religious attitudes will not survive the first contact with a truly serious enemy - in other words, a system with substantial complexity that can't be expressed in an elegant way. I don't think it's a mistake that strong FP guys spend so much time hacking around on compilers, type systems, regular expressions, etc. Maybe a foray into scientific computing - but if you're biting off problems that were previously tackled by a bunch of nested loops in HPF, maybe these aren't the world's most hairy algorithms either.
Why do computers exist, and why do people study them? Because they're very useful for "practical concerns". Practical concerns should be at the heart of any study of computers and computation; it's impractical for them not to be.