[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

On 09/11/10 20:59, Nix wrote:
> 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.

That's fine in theory but in practice, compared to the imperative coding 
I was used and OO coding I was being introduced to I found ML so oblique 
and practically useless as to be nothing but frustrating, plus the book 
cost £50 I could ill afford at the time. I'm still not convinced it has 
any use at all in the real world.

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.

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 
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. 
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 
of posterity) and are nowhere near complete enough to use in actual 
application development. I'm sure some of that work benefits the science 
of computing but learning the bulk of these languages would be wasted 
time to me and would pain me in equal measure to the joy you might 
extract from them.

The only languages I've ever enjoyed learning have been ones that 
significantly increase my capabilities (and hence productivity) such as 
Python or ones that really broaden the mind like Smalltalk. Most other 
languages with their ugly brackets everywhere syntaxes, barren libraries 
and nasty workflows can jump in the sea for all I care. If I'd known at 
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.

But what do I know, by your definition I "shouldn't be writing code at all".

:-/

Roger



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