[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

On 10/11/10 00:32, Nix wrote:
>
> It's not: but that's not what universities are for. It does what it's
> meant to (assuming you learn something more conventional as well), which
> is to teach you a wide spread of the total domain of computer languages.
> If you can learn ML and something conventional, nothing much is going to
> give you trouble.
>    

I'd simplify it further: If you can learn something conventional, 
nothing much is going to give you trouble.

Non-conventional is just that, not often encountered, so given very 
finite resources it doesn't make that much sense to teach it at the 
expense of the conventional which, presumably, you're going to encounter 
all the bloody time. Interesting though such subjects are it doesn't 
make sense to spend as much time on them as my Uni seemed determined to, 
especially with education getting more expensive every year. Those who 
want to explore further are always free to do so on their own time, 
there's a huge wealth of info for the autodictat out there and at Uni 
you can always talk to your lecturers, visit the library or audit some 
more advanced classes.

I reckon the useful concepts one might extract from learning ML 
(something my uni dedicated a whole 10 week module to) could be taught 
quite simply in an afternoon seminar using less pure but practically 
useful languages. FP may be a paradigm who's time hasn't yet come but 
I'll wager that's coz it's not much use to the majority of developers 
right now.

>> I take issue with your other point too: "If you don't think learning
>> languages is a high joy, you shouldn't be writing code at all."
>>
>> Well that's a bit conceited.
>>      
> Nah. Each language teaches you something new about how to think about
> programming: if you don't learn them for fun, you're constraining your
> abilities unnecessarily.

Well call me impatient but I'd rather someone summarised those nuggets 
for me in a short blog post, or maybe in a google tech talk, that would 
have been a lot more efficient than forcing me to code huge tranches of 
Modula2. The only knowledge I took away from that was that my lecturer 
was a crusty old strict-typing stalwart who was a) totally out of touch 
with modern thought and practices and b) wanted someone to use _his_ 
rubbishy Modula2 framework. Hardly worth spending weeks of my life on.



>   I note a very strong correlation between people
> who don't like learning languages and people who don't like keeping
> their code neat and maintainable and whose code I thus have to clean up
> or rewrite all the bloody time: call it *pride in craft*.
>    

Correlation is not causation. I'm sad you work with people who don't 
take any pride in what they do however despite being an amateur 
(programming has only ever occasionally been a day job for me) I try 
very hard to adhere to good practices and my code is as neat as I know 
how to make it. I think I have a better chance of becoming a good coder 
someday by concentrating on a couple of languages and learning them in 
depth rather than flitting between them and never picking up their 
subtleties or idioms.

>> I love coding but learning and relearning and relearning syntaxes and
>> grammars over and over again isn't my idea of fun. I'm an applied
>>      
> It's not almost automatic for you? Perhaps you haven't learnt enough
> languages for it to get really fast: it gets easier and easier the more
> languages you know, as you find more and more relationships between
> them. I learnt enough Lua to be getting on with in two days, for
> instance, with the main constraint being the speed I could read the
> manual. And I don't consider that unusual.
>
>    

Two days you could have spent coding ;P



>> person, I like making things that do stuff. I can happily spend all day
>> creating algorithms and structures and protocols, having to learn new
>> languages is a royal pain in the arse as it can put weeks or months of
>> learning in between me having an idea and getting it up and running.
>>      
> Weeks or months?! To get good enough to write production code in a
> new language, perhaps, but surely not to learn it. (Maybe we're using
> 'learn' to mean different things?)
>
>    

Well I do want to write production code. Given my stated position if I 
was only writing toy code or throwaway utilities do you think I would be 
bothering to learn yet another language? I'm writing things that I want 
to use with real people's data, some of it very sensitive and some of it 
very precious and, as you are aware, writing highly robust and secure 
code in languages you already know can be non-trivial, plenty of 
full-time coders get that stuff wrong all the time.

I think our definitions of learn must differ somewhat, I would only 
consider myself to have learned a language if I could teach a working 
set of it to someone from memory or write fairly useful/correct code in 
it without consulting any other references. By my definition I have 
probably only really learned one or two languages and a few markups, I 
have learned enough to get by in bloody dozens over the years though, at 
times for money (can you think of any other reason to write 
Actionscript?!) and often it was a chore, at other times it was abject 
pain (I'm looking at you again Flash!). Let's face it some languages are 
just crap: for example I didn't much enjoy learning PHP, in fact I found 
it's lack of proper namespaces and classes quite nauseating and it hurt 
me every time I had to write 5 lines of code to do something I knew was 
a one liner in a better language. The only thing anyone familiar with 
nicer languages could take away from that experience is that the biggest 
enemy of a perfect solution is one that is just about good enough - 
something I both knew already and hadn't had to waste days and weeks 
learning.


>> Besides, most languages are awful. The vast majority of them are only
>> created to gain an academic a doctorate (or if they're lucky a measure
>>      
> Hardly. Academic languages are so obscure that I hardly ever pay any
> attention to them. Most academics seem in any case to be totally stuck
>    

I agree but surely the total set of languages ever created contains far 
more incomplete/proof of concept/academic languages that nobody ever 
uses than fully fledged useful languages with healthy communities and 
good libraries?



>
>> languages with their ugly brackets everywhere syntaxes, barren libraries
>>      
> If that's all you think Lisp is about you're missing the core of it:
> macros and what you can do with them (which are intimately tied to the
> lack-of-syntax parenthetic notation). Now *that* is mind-expanding.
>
>    

Heh, I never mentioned lisp, why does that spring to mind eh? ;)

I have to say I think brackets and semicolons are the worst thing to 
happen to higher level languages since GOTO. I had accepted them as a 
grim fact of life until the epiphaneous day I came across python and now 
it pains me every time I need to write in something else! I think 
Ritchie got an awful lot right with C and after all back then every byte 
cost real money but with modern broadband, terrabyte drives, compression 
and minifying I can't help think we should have left the brackets and 
semicolons behind by now!


>> and nasty workflows can jump in the sea for all I care. If I'd known at
>>      
> You see, I think that probably makes you a worse programmer than you'd
> otherwise be. What matters about those languages isn't whether they're
> directly useful: it's how they affect how you think about programming
>
>    

Really I take your point but I'd rather read articles explaining that 
wisdom than waste weeks of my life finding it out the hard way, I don't 
think learning to code in COBOL would be an efficient use of my time 
when someone who knows COBOL can probably sum up what's worth knowing 
about it in a few sentences. I'm all about acquiring knowledge but the 
hard way is rarely the best way, for example... if I wanted to know more 
about the phone system would I be better of a) buying a BT engineer a 
pint and chatting for an hour or two? or b) Taking my voltmeter and 
notebook out onto the streets and prising open the nearest green cabinet?


>> the time that Soft Eng would be teaching me I would have signed up for
>> Comp Sci instead, I hear they got to learn useful languages things like
>> C and Java and ASM.
>>      
> Not in my uni. Nor in any half-decent one, I'd hope.
>    


Well fair enough, "half-decent" would be a charitable description of my 
Uni, or should I say, crappy ex-poly!

Cheers,

Roger

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