Posted: Sun Jan 01, 2006 9:17 pm
I think he meant by educated, "official" education... something you can put in a resume.. if he just meant general knowledge I would have to agree with you hockey
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Simple evolution...d11wtq wrote:Just because something is easier to learn doesn't mean it's a bad thing to learn. Technology is always moving forward and new languages will keep surfacing, each one perhaps making certain tasks a little easier or cleaner -- that's not bad, that's just technology evolving. You have to move with the times.
Granted, it's easier to pick between good and bad devlopers in a language like C but you can still see differences in any language.
Hell.... If I got hung up on one language and nothing else there's a good chance I'd be out of the job in 30 years time.
I figured he might be saying that...jshpro2 wrote:I think he meant by educated, "official" education... something you can put in a resume.. if he just meant general knowledge I would have to agree with you hockey
As I said in my post..jshpro2 wrote:I think he meant by educated, "official" education... something you can put in a resume.. if he just meant general knowledge I would have to agree with you hockey
I already explained that I don't feel that degree=education, but as a general statement, a group of people that have earned more degrees is generally more educated (especially in this discussion).Roja wrote: Granted, in this discussion, I'm defining that (educated) as the lack of a degree, which is certainly not always a perfect match to not being educated, but I think its a reasonable comment for this context.
Roja wrote:As I said in my post..jshpro2 wrote:I think he meant by educated, "official" education... something you can put in a resume.. if he just meant general knowledge I would have to agree with you hockey
I already explained that I don't feel that degree=education, but as a general statement, a group of people that have earned more degrees is generally more educated (especially in this discussion).Roja wrote: Granted, in this discussion, I'm defining that (educated) as the lack of a degree, which is certainly not always a perfect match to not being educated, but I think its a reasonable comment for this context.
Joel is arguing that school needs to be *harder*, because the graduates aren't smart enough. I posit the opposite - that school needs to be less challenging at first, so that we get a larger community of more educated candidates to draw from.
Wow! Well spokenBDKR wrote:Speaking of all this edumakashum stuff, perhaps I shouldn't be listenting to "Beercan" by Beck (which just tickles the hell out of me).![]()
About Joel, I wouldn't say he has a "better than you" attitude, but it can be a little caustic. However, if you think he's bad, try some Fabian Pascal! That guy will step on your toes with certainty.
That said, he does sound typical of a lot of older guys that have been there and it's something I've come to expect. When they don't like the way thngs are going, they can easily sound like the bitter old tossers they are busily becoming. LOL....
But I think his tone is besides the point. Instead, is their truth in what he says. Or perhaps a better question is one of import. Is it indeed important to consider the things he's mentioning? In short low level vs high level programming knowledge. I think that ultimately depends on the direction one wants to go.
However, all of the high level stuff we do today is firmly planted on the shoulders of that low level stuff. PHP is written in C. So is Python. So is Perl. Same with the Linux Kernel and MySQL. Of course we can keep building higher and higher levels of abstraction, but there has to be someone that can speak to the metal somewhere. The person that can do that and also do application development will have a very complete view of what's going on as opposed to someone that can create an object but doesn't know what message passing is, does not know what's meant by a "tree" or "queue", or never heared of recursion. Joel's contention is that this person make a more valuable application developer becuase he's more likely to understand and fix problems that may arise at level closer to the metal.
There is more to programming than application development. If you want to write OS's, HAL's, 3D engines, or code used for scientific purposes, then it starts to become very important to have a greater understanding of some of these low level concepts. I personally love PHP becuase it allows me to focus on logic and I'm not bothered with worrying about strings. But I'm uttterly fascinated with things like 3D engines and MegaSquirt (Open source DIY Fuel Injection code. I'm also into high performance Turbo charged cars). I also like do systems stuff. Clusters in particular. Therefore, this stuff is of interest to me.
Furthermore, when I started chewing on "Fundemental Algorithms" (which is Vol 1 of "The Art of Computer Programming") by Donald E. Knuth, not only was I completely blown away about how much I didn't know, but I was later blown away x10 by how much of a better programmer (PHP included) it made me.
Anyway, I don't believe that knowing C is a pre-req for becomming a good programmer. Nor do I believe that a CS major is needed. Hell, I'm a music major. LOL. (And is it turns out, my hero, John Carmack, never finished college either.) Just define where you want to go and do what it takes to get there. BUT, keeping that old jingle about reviewing the past so you don't repeat stuff in your head, perhaps there is a reason to read and listen to the ranting of old tossers like Fabian Pascal and Joel Spolsky. Or at the very least, to make sure you have a good understanding of the varying paradigms and how we arrived at the present acceptable "think" on application development.
Cheers,
BDKR
This is interesting and at first blush I completely agree with it.Roja wrote: ... - that school needs to be less challenging at first, so that we get a larger community of more educated candidates to draw from.
Here is how i would teach things:BDKR wrote: But for making it easier, teaching something like PHP (with no OO) up front just to get the students to think logically as programmers would be a wonderful idea in my opinion. At least in this way, the more difficult things can be introduced to a person that at least has a grip on coding.
The warnings and errors the GNU compiler gives are excellent IMO. You'll get a line number, a reason why it failed (or warned) and sometime's you'll even get a possible resolution. I've not worked with any others since it's just something I play around with in my spare time to keep that squishy blob of dough in my head entertainedmickd wrote:the only problem i face is that since i know what lots of the c commands are (since alot of them are similar to php) but lack the experience in writing the c applications, i get alot of syntax errors etc and the c errors that get the complier shows arnt as logical as php ones
overall, just cant be bothered to sit down and practise some basic c programming...