I'm with iabervon here. I am a good computer scientist because I know all kinds of cool stuff (mostly best done in Scheme). But I am a kick-ass computer programmer because I spent three years writing nothing but C -- macro-heavy setjmp/longjmp cross-platform standards-compliant code from hell.
Languages are languages -- I've used 40 of them at last count -- but some are special. C is incomparable. Java is fascinating (in good and bad ways). Scheme was a revelation at the time, though it got clunky pretty quickly. And the number of people with fond memories of CLU is really remarkable.
(Actually, I see a lot of that. CLU got a lot of things right. Even non-MIT people with CLU experience liked it. I think there's a huge latent CLU-nostalgia out there...)
An MIT education taught me how to learn languages effortlessly. That's been incredibly useful to me, because there are so many of the damned things (and so few worth more than a few minutes learning effort). What would have been most useful are two things: A hard-core practical '033-like lab in C (targeting multiple OS platforms, of course, and with horrible buggy library code like in '034), and a survey not of languages but of things you have to wire languages to -- databases, Makefiles, GUIs, filesystems, pipes, XML flavour-of-the-day, dumb-ass VB apps, installation scripts, HA watchdogging, and the like -- a solid warning about the 80% of programming that's really just plumbing.
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Date: 2006-03-28 03:32 pm (UTC)Languages are languages -- I've used 40 of them at last count -- but some are special. C is incomparable. Java is fascinating (in good and bad ways). Scheme was a revelation at the time, though it got clunky pretty quickly. And the number of people with fond memories of CLU is really remarkable.
(Actually, I see a lot of that. CLU got a lot of things right. Even non-MIT people with CLU experience liked it. I think there's a huge latent CLU-nostalgia out there...)
An MIT education taught me how to learn languages effortlessly. That's been incredibly useful to me, because there are so many of the damned things (and so few worth more than a few minutes learning effort). What would have been most useful are two things: A hard-core practical '033-like lab in C (targeting multiple OS platforms, of course, and with horrible buggy library code like in '034), and a survey not of languages but of things you have to wire languages to -- databases, Makefiles, GUIs, filesystems, pipes, XML flavour-of-the-day, dumb-ass VB apps, installation scripts, HA watchdogging, and the like -- a solid warning about the 80% of programming that's really just plumbing.