Joel Gives College Advice For Programmers

An anonymous reader writes "Joel on Software explains what college students should do with their lives. Interesting to note is how he justifies such trivialties as GPA scores and well-roundedness, the very things comments here tend to think are overrated. In short, learn to write English, learn to write C, and don't worry about India!"

Comments

Response to Joel

[alphakappa]

Here is Sriram Krishnan's response to Joel's advice

Anti-intellectualism is actually...

[cnelzie]

...a large part of being a citizen of the United States these days. When I was younger, I was in the arrogant land of believing that College Degrees were over-rated and worth very little on paper.

However, in the years since, I have grown in wisdom and have discovered that book knowledge will only get you so far and that personal experience will also, only get you so far. Taken together, a person can go places that having only one alone would be near impossible.

Now, reaching my 30's, I am kicking myself in the rear working towards obtaining a college degree to build upon and further my career goals.

If I had an opportunity to peform a 'do-over' the only thing that I would change in my life is completing at least an Associate's Degree the first few years after completing High School.

Very bad advice

[Stu Charlton]

This piece was an exercise in ego, with a couple of decent nuggets thrown in.

But this line takes the cake: ...if you can't explain why while (*s++ = *t++); copies a string, or if that isn't the most natural thing in the world to you, well, you're programming based on superstition, as far as I'm concerned...

Right. Because programming is all about understanding pointer arithmetic.

This statement has nothing to do with CS, nothing to do with software engineering, nothing to do with digital design or assembly. This strikes me purely as "my language is better than your language" elitism.

I firmly believe in his general thesis: a great software developer pays attention to soft and hard skills. Software development is a continuum of skills: at one extreme, it's all about people -- at the other extreme, it's all about computer science.

However, the argument that the best programmers must know C idioms can be reduced to the argument that the best programmers must know (in depth) electrical engineering, digital design, or physics. Because otherwise, it's just superstition that the machine works!

In today's world, knowledge is the essential resource. It's more important to know how to organize your ignorance than to try to learn everything.

Abstract languages like Simula, Lisp, and Smalltalk completely changed the way we look at computer science. It brought the "people" element back into it - the need to think and communicate primarily at the level of the problem, not at the level of the machine -- but retaining the ability to drop down to machine level when necessary.

Abelson and Sussman explained this shift in the preface to SICP, which I think is a good way to end this rant (highlights mine):

First, we want to establish the idea that a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

Second, we believe that the essential material to be addressed by a subject at this level is not the syntax of particular programming-language constructs, nor clever algorithms for computing particular functions efficiently, nor even the mathematical analysis of algorithms and the foundations of computing, but rather the techniques used to control the intellectual complexity of large software systems.

[...]

Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that ``computer science'' is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology -- the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of ``what is.'' Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of ``how to.''