The summer between my junior and senior years of high school, my dad suggested I take a course in logic from the local community college.  I forget what else accompanied, something explicit or implicit I’m sure, falling under the general parental-advice-umbrella of “how this would be good for me.”  At the time this advice went through the two stages of my teenage listening process: acknowledgment that I’d heard what was said and then prompt dismissal of what I’d heard.  And, obviously, I spent that summer not logically thinking about anything.

Now, with my Computer Science degree nearly ten years old, I can see value in the suggestion.  Not that if I met my 17-year-old self on the street, I’d do a better job convincing him that his dad had a point, but as a web developer, logic is the tool used most often, not the table-based HTML layouts and laughably simple Javascript I learned in the Fall of 2002. Continue reading →