[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“Lam Vi Quoc negotiates his scooter through Ho Chi Minh City’s
relentless stream of pedal traffic and hangs a right down a crowded
alley. He climbs the steep wooden stairs of the tiny house he
shares with nine family members, passing by his mother, who is
stooped on the floor of the second level preparing lunch. He
ascends another set of even steeper steps to the third level and
settles on a stool at a small desk, pushing aside the rolled-up mat
he sleeps on with one of his brothers. To the smell of a chicken
roasting on a grill in the alley and the clang of the next-door
neighbor’s metalworking operation, Lam turns on his Pentium 4 PC,
and soon the screen displays Lecture 2 of Laboratory in Software
Engineering, a course taught each semester on the campus of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ‘Here,’ he says, pointing at
the screen. ‘This is where I got the idea to use decoupling as a
way of integrating two programs.’“In a huge brick house that Evan Hoff shares with three other
guys in Nashville, the 20-year-old brings up the MIT Web site and
connects to the same material Lam is studying halfway around the
world. ‘This is the lecture on data abstraction,’ Hoff explains. ‘I
went over this in community college, but that class only took it so
far. This teaches you about the three different specification
conditions, the things you put in documentation to let future
programmers know how to use it. In community college we covered
only two of them…'”