Re:Java Developers
by the_af on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @01:00PM
(#8070055)
I more or less agree with your post, but take issue with a few things:
- Maybe I come from a different kind of academia, but in my CS education they didn't force "large unnecessary abstractions". Mind you, they didn't teach Java, C++ or any particular language. Learning programming languages was something you did in special optional classes or on your own.
- It is fascinating and instructive to learn low-level languages such as assembly, which I enjoyed learning in my spare time, but I don't think that's "what the actually world needs". The world needs reliable, non-bugged software that does what we want and is easy to understand, maintain and extend. Certainly not something that would be helped by coding in assembly...
To clarify: I believe it's immensely instructive to learn about low-level stuff. It should probably be mandatory in a good CS education. But it's not a good idea, in general, to actually build programs by manipulating low-level language. Sometimes it can't be helped, of course, by I assume we're mainly discussing application software here.
- Maybe I come from a different kind of academia, but in my CS education they didn't force "large unnecessary abstractions". Mind you, they didn't teach Java, C++ or any particular language. Learning programming languages was something you did in special optional classes or on your own.
- It is fascinating and instructive to learn low-level languages such as assembly, which I enjoyed learning in my spare time, but I don't think that's "what the actually world needs". The world needs reliable, non-bugged software that does what we want and is easy to understand, maintain and extend. Certainly not something that would be helped by coding in assembly...
To clarify: I believe it's immensely instructive to learn about low-level stuff. It should probably be mandatory in a good CS education. But it's not a good idea, in general, to actually build programs by manipulating low-level language. Sometimes it can't be helped, of course, by I assume we're mainly discussing application software here.