The Perils of JavaSchools
18th August 2010
Joel Spolsky turns into a Grumpy Old Man.
When I was a kid, I learned to program on punched cards. If you made a mistake, you didn’t have any of these modern features like a backspace key to correct it. You threw away the card and started over.
Heck, in 1900, Latin and Greek were required subjects in college, not because they served any purpose, but because they were sort of considered an obvious requirement for educated people. In some sense my argument is no different that the argument made by the pro-Latin people (all four of them). “[Latin] trains your mind. Trains your memory. Unraveling a Latin sentence is an excellent exercise in thought, a real intellectual puzzle, and a good introduction to logical thinking,” writes Scott Barker. But I can’t find a single university that requires Latin any more. Are pointers and recursion the Latin and Greek of Computer Science?
August 18th, 2010 at 10:40
I never thought of pointers, or recursion, as difficult, whereas state, and local, knife law parsing gave me fits. Really, and just for example, how difficult is it to actually define something you want to outlaw?
August 18th, 2010 at 20:27
Ask the people responsible for the ‘assault weapon’ bans. First you have to know what you’re talking about; you can’t just say ‘You can’t own anything we think is icky’.