[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[Bruce Richardson]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 08:50:50PM +0000, Nix wrote:
> >
> > I'd simplify it further: If you can learn something conventional, 
> > nothing much is going to give you trouble.
> 
> One lanugage is not enough. When you only know one language, you don't
> know enough to know which features in languages are common and which are
> unique to that language: and without that knowledge I'd suggest that you
> necessarily don't know how to construct algorithms which best use those
> features.

Yes, absolutely.  It works precisely this way with "Human" languages;
the more of them you learn, not only does it become easier to learn each
new language but you find that your mastery of previously learned ones
has improved.  Complaining that ML is impractical is like rejecting
Latin, in that respect.

> (A classic example is the obsession with teaching Java. In a lot of
> universities this started pre-Java 1.2, and in most it started pre-Java
> 1.5, and then 1.2 or 1.5 came out and turned the way programs in those
> languages were written upside down. All that was left from the Java
> teaching after that was the general stuff, really.)

Oh, I do wish universities wouldn't teach Java.  It really is one of
those languages best handled by somebody who has absorbed the lessons of
a few other language first.  I've had the misfortune, in the past, to
inherit job lots of graduate java developers and they almost all
useless; raving about design patterns while unable to do something as
simple as iterate through a list.

-- 
Bruce

A problem shared brings the consolation that someone else is now
feeling as miserable as you.
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