[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[Nix]

On 8 Nov 2010, general told this:
> PS: My tutors thought it was a good idea to teach us ML instead of C, 
> thanks guys that was soooo useful!

Excellent idea. It's a very different language from any you're likely to
learn anywhere else, with some superb ideas in it, so it ensures that
you learn at least two very different languages from different parts of
the language family tree. (It's also a fairly influential language as
functional languages go: the only way you could find a functional
language that's influenced more non-functional ones would be to pick
Lisp). In my opinion nobody who hasn't learnt (and internalized) at
least that many should be allowed near code that other people will run.
You can pick up C anywhere, and most of the knowledge needed to be a
good C programmer is transmitted via osmosis and hands-on learning
anyway, not via lectures or textbooks. (This is as distinct from the
knowledge you need to be a good $anything programmer, a lot of which
they will have taught you, e.g. the rudiments of complexity theory,
modularization, and so on and so forth.)

(Decent programmers know way, *way* more than two languages. I think I
knew five by the time I was ten. I can't even count them now, and if I
tried to list them I'd be sure to miss a lot out. In this I am not
remotely unusual. If you don't think learning languages is a high joy,
you shouldn't be writing code at all.)
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