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Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by Locke1689 on Sunday January 16, 2011 @11:03PM (#2111162)
I don't know what you mean by "hotshot" exactly, but all of the people who had extensive experience in my high school also knew functional programming and data structures and algorithms.

I'm not sure math makes all that much of a difference either because the most experienced people in my class were all doing math-related things (myself a physics minor, my girlfriend a math minor, and my two other friends a math and physics double major, respectively).

Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by _delirium on Monday January 17, 2011 @12:56AM (#2111370)
That definitely wasn't the case at my high school. The high-school coders were almost exclusively some mixture of C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, and maybe bash. There probably were nonzero people who had used Scheme, but I'd be very surprised if it were more than one or two.
Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by rwmj on Monday January 17, 2011 @03:58AM (#2111617)
And if a few of them tried Scheme, then teach Prolog. Nobody knows that ;-)
Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by Locke1689 on Monday January 17, 2011 @05:26PM (#2113718)
Meh. Do you really think learning programming languages is hard? I think with C, C++, Python, Scheme, CL, Haskell, Racket, and ML under my belt it would take me about a day or two to adapt to new syntax and then you'd be back in the same position you started in.

I just wouldn't worry so much about experienced students or give them something extra to work on if they wanted it. I started programming when I was 9, meaning I had been messing around with Linux, systems, programming languages, and algorithms for a full 9 years before stepping into my first class freshman year. My professors did the proper thing and used the finals from the freshman year CS courses to propel me to upper level courses in my first quarter. Don't try to work against experience, work with it.

Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by Hexstream on Monday January 17, 2011 @07:21PM (#2114013)
Failing that, Forth or J ;P
Re:My Experiences as a Female Software Engineer by leon_ on Monday January 17, 2011 @04:09AM (#2111648)
It's that "func programming is rocket science"-stigma people nowadays spread. I don't know why they hype functional programming that much (maybe because they could show off the C "hotshots" in their CS 101 course?) but FP is such a basic and simple paradigm that it's not really something to brag about.