Spolsky: The Perils of JavaSchools
Just go and read this latest essay by Joel now. It is absolutely spot on.
All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II would get to college, take CompSci 101, a data structures course, and when they hit the pointers business their brains would just totally explode, and the next thing you knew, they were majoring in Political Science because law school seemed like a better idea.
…I have never met anyone who can do Scheme, Haskell, and C pointers who can’t pick up Java in two days, and create better Java code than people with five years of experience in Java, but try explaining that to the average HR drone.
The point that Joel is making is key: that CompSci degrees are supposed to be about teaching how to program, not how to program in one particular language.
Software development is an art form, a skill. It is not a rote-taught methodology.
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Steve,
I agree to a point, but a language serves as the vehicle for getting the lay of the land vis-a-vis programming. What I like about C# is that we can play with a Java-like language that allows direct memory management. Joel can be really negative sometimes.