Re: Latest Joel article

"José González D'Amico" wrote
>
> What do you think? Specially of the OOP-bashing he does near the end.

As with Wayne and Jim, the 'OO-bashing' doesn't particularly bother me,
though it is wrong-headed.

First, the idea that OO is too simple to allow the good programmers to stand
out is simply silly--pointers aren't hard in any basic sense either. If an
old style CS101 course had a higher dropout rate than a new style Java
intro, the difference isn't between pointers and objects, but between the
relative complexities of what people are being asked to do with them (and as
he really admits, that's an academic politics issue and has nothing to do
with subject matter).

As Joel mentions, the actual material of either approach is tiny--you spend
the rest of the semester 'getting it.' It's got no more to do with Scheme
vs. Java than learning to think has with whether or not Latin is required.

So fundamentally, I think Joel has his glasses on backwards: he thinks he
can tell the great from the mediocre programmers quickly based on the
material he was taught in college, but admits he can't do that with the new
kids. And part of the reason for that, apparently, is that he's still
conducting his screening the way he did and with the same questions he used
twenty years ago.

Where's the vaunted mental agility that he's demanding of his interns? The
yardstick he was using was always extrinsic--like telling how new a pair of
shoes are by how shiny they are, it worked great until people started
wearing sneakers and suede. But at that point it's really the standard that
fails, not the shoes: there are still old and new ones just like always, and
you still need to figure out which are which.

Maybe Joel needs to stop waxing nostalgic about Latin, and start figuring
out a better way to think about applicants. The first thing to consider is
asking what he really wants--and I'd suggest that that's /not/ the ability
to whip out pointer code on a whiteboard, and really never was.

bobD



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