Re:Top Indian CEO: Most American Grads Are 'Unemployable'
by jimbokun on Monday June 22, 2009 @10:24AM
(#668789)
"I was told, by our most talented Indian engineer, that this would not happen because the values in the HashMap would magically spring back after the DAO was done with it."
I find it interesting that this understanding corresponds to the immutable data types used in functional programming languages. In Clojure, for example, a function that appears to alter a map actually creates a new map that shares some of its values with the old one.
There is this notion that the ideas of functional programming are more advanced, or harder to understand than paradigms like OO with mutable data. But in this case the intuition of a naive programmer more closely follows the immutable functional paradigm.
Of course, it is just as likely that this same programmer will expect the same data structure to be mutated in other scenarios, and ascribing a consistent model to his understanding of the code is an invalid assumption.
I find it interesting that this understanding corresponds to the immutable data types used in functional programming languages. In Clojure, for example, a function that appears to alter a map actually creates a new map that shares some of its values with the old one.
There is this notion that the ideas of functional programming are more advanced, or harder to understand than paradigms like OO with mutable data. But in this case the intuition of a naive programmer more closely follows the immutable functional paradigm.
Of course, it is just as likely that this same programmer will expect the same data structure to be mutated in other scenarios, and ascribing a consistent model to his understanding of the code is an invalid assumption.