[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[Nix]

On 11 Nov 2010, Bruce Richardson told this:

> On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 08:50:50PM +0000, Nix wrote:
>> (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.

It could be worse. They could be teaching C++, a language explicitly
'designed for experts', as a first language.

>                           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.

Oh yes. Most of them I've talked to are great at picking patterns out of
a list but can't design even a simple algorithm and don't seem to know
anything about complexity either. (I'm not asking for detailed knowledge
of complexity classes, but being able to look at something and say 'oh
yes that's obviously O(n^2) but n is always small so this is better than
that O(n log n) with a higher time constant' is crucial for all of
programming as far as I'm concerned, and similarly for space complexity,
as these days that reflects directly on time complexity as well).

I mean, these are the core talents of software developers, critical
parts of being able to 'think like a computer'. And these alleged
software developers in large part don't have it. What have those
universities been *teaching* them? How to assemble recipes from a list?
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