4. It’s not a vocational school. Unlike traditional vocational schools, this new school will have a rigorous academic component and will prepare students for college. But college is not for everyone—many of the best programmers I know were just not interested enough in a general four year degree and went straight into jobs programming.

This is an interesting experiment. I personally know some great programmers who do not have any degree (not even a BSc), and it seems that you can do very well without attending any CS classes in college. One thing I wonder about is how many of important CS concepts can a teenager’s mind digest. I don’t think I’d have been able to understand recursion, higher order functions and some other CS concepts in high school, but perhaps you don’t really need to know all this stuff, or perhaps I’m slow.

Anyway, a brilliant idea.