Re: java questions for Interview in coorporate

From:
Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:54:32 GMT
Message-ID:
<YOwjj.10674$6F6.8346@trndny09>
Lew wrote:

Too many Java programmers, aside from not being able to spell the
language, really don't know how to program. It's not really their
fault; "Joel on Software" a while back blogged as to how teaching Java
in undergrad programs diminishes the effectiveness of programmer
education. (No pointer arithmetic, not enough low-level pain.)


I have actually had a long discussion on this with some teachers (for
the high school level). The problem with programming is that teaching
someone C is liable to steer them away. But after learning such low-ish
level languages, the ability to understand further languages greatly
increases.

I have seen a large class of people, taught one year of Java and at
least having taken the APCS exam, struggle to get C code working and
utterly collapse at mild assembly (an inability to use gdb aggravates
the problem). The newer, script-ish languages like Ruby and python would
be even worse in the sense of continuing on in programming languages.

Perhaps other problems might be poor teachers: I had one CS teacher who
swore that the "instanceof" keyword was a method. Learning a programming
language can be difficult if the teacher his/herself does not have a
good grasp on it: many high school CS teachers are actually math
teachers given the task of teaching CS.

Note: this is in the context of the required programming course that all
high school students had to take at my school.

--
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

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