[Sussex] How to tell if someone a really good programmer?

[Geoffrey Teale]

On 08/02/2008, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com> wrote:
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I was with you right up to there. I took MIT's introduction to computing
> course with Gerry Sussman, which was a seious course on Scheme designed
> to force out people not serious about computer science While Jerry is an
> excellent instructor, and had a great deal of insight to impart, I
> thought he was hampered by the absolute "let's make everything
> recursive" and "there's a layer of abstraction, we don't actually care
> what actually happens as long as we can write our part in one less line
> of code" that was the *mandated* approach for the course. Scheme has
> generated a large number of navel-gazing programmers who couldn't
> garbage collect their way out of a dustpan, and couldn't find the I/O
> skills to write "Hello, World.".


Yes.. I take the point on academic navel-gazing, that said my point was not
that they thought it was cool, but that they understood why it was cool and
that they can explain it succinctly. It's easy for anyone to say "Scheme
rocks, because it has macros" - or any cool feature of any other language
for that matter. To really understand that feature, how it can be used and
why that is an advantage over approaches used elsewhere, and then be able to
convey those ideas to another human being requires something a little more.
People who waffle tend to have one of two problems - either they don't
understand or they can't communicate.  Either is an issue on most
environments.


*SHUDDER*.


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I would if I could: I'm dealing with SCO OpenServer right now, and even
> getting vim on it was an adventure. *Shudder*.



Ah yes... I used SCO Unix in my first post Uni job, I even received ksh and
vi (I spit on it) training from a SCO trainer.   Consider youself, *ahem*
lucky to be using a piece of computing history.  It so happens that our US
office is directly upstairs from SCO's office in New Jersey.   All I can say
is they have more available floor space than they used to....  :-)

-- 
Geoff Teale
<tealeg at member.fsf.org>
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