fplanque: dev blog

"A sure sign of my descent into senility is bitchin' and moanin' about "kids these days," and how they won't or can't do anything hard any more."

So goes the intro to Joel's "The Perils of JavaSchools".

Higly relevant and highly recommended, as usual!

"Pointers and recursion require a certain ability to reason, to think in abstractions, and, most importantly, to view a problem at several levels of abstraction simultaneously. And thus, the ability to understand pointers and recursion is directly correlated with the ability to be a great programmer.

[...]

You need training to think of things at multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously, and that kind of thinking is exactly what you need to design great software architecture."

Among other things, Joel talks about how Universities made the mistake of replacing courses on C pointers and recursion with courses on simple Java... and those universities include UPenn... my second most enjoyable experience in the 90ies (the most enjoyable one being the bubble of course! )

Also, Joel talks about how it gets difficult to distinguish the top programmers from the average because you can't ask them about pointers & recursion right out of school any longer... I've got the same issue with database programmers. You can't ask them about concurrent transactions and normalizing databases any longer... Ironically, I learnt most of that at UPenn... back then in the 90ies...