My Ignorant-ass Response to “The Perils of JavaSchools”
Joel on Software. Period. His latest article piquing my interest is “The Perils of JavaSchools.” The gist is that there is this conspiracy among Computer Science college professors to keep their jobs by turning out Java people instead of “real” computer programmers:
Instead what I’d like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers. It may be a fine language to work in, but that’s not today’s topic. I would even go so far as to say that the fact that Java is not hard enough is a feature, not a bug, but it does have this one problem.
So Joel’s “real world” problem is that he has one intelligence test to use for prospective hires—and this intelligence test depends on the applicant’s knowledge of C/C++ pointers and recursion. Java-schooled applicants are unable to complete Joel’s test because they have no knowledge of pointers and their recursion stuff suffers as well.
Well, here in the rasx() context, it must be worse for us .NET programmers. The assumption here is that Java programmers are more academic than .NET programmers so we are bound to fail Joel’s intelligence test. From this distance and this level of ignorance of Joel’s problems, I question why he has only one intelligence test. Is not Joel creative and intelligent enough to develop another test for competency for viewing a problem “at several levels of abstraction simultaneously”? My answer is, ‘Yes, but Joel does not really care about solving his problem. He just wants me to know about his problem.’ Thanks, Joel.
So I wonder what intelligence test Rockford Lhotka has for prospective new hires. What would happen when Joel and Rocky “face off” and compare notes? Is there a Web 2.0 application out there that can solve this problem?