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

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Geoffrey Teale wrote:
>
>
> On 08/02/2008, *Nico Kadel-Garcia* <nkadel at gmail.com 
> <mailto:nkadel at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> --- %< ----
>
>     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.
Ahh. *THAT* makes more sense. I failed to see the implicit smiley in 
your description of it. Please forgive me if I seem a bit harsh, for 
reasons you noticed below.
>
> --- %< ----
>
>     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....  :-)
Heh. They were heading down that path even before the lawsuits. I don't 
suppose your office mates there have noticed any licenses for SCO 5.0.6 
in the dumpsters, especially SMP and development licenses? I've got a 
box I'd like to set up as a protected development server for *ME* as 
part of this "migration to Linux" project, to keep me away from anyone 
else's work while I hammer out system issues, and would prefer not to 
spend the ridiculous licensinig fees for something I'll only use for a 
few months.