Re: Interesting article by Joel Spolsky: The Perils of JavaSchools


On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Gerry Quinn wrote:

ajo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...
On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Gerry Quinn wrote: 
when those who consider themselves as members of an intellectual elite
get worried that their inferiors are achieving much the same things as
they can, without having bothered with the elaborate membership
initiations.  "They must be stopped", they wail.  "How can the sacred
work be left in the hands of ignorami?".


   Not at all. That is, I think you've hit the nail on the head with
respect to the elite's attitude, but somehow you've come to the bizarre
conclusion that "inferior" programmers are indeed achieving "much the
same things" as the good, smart programmers. Would you disagree that
most of the software produced today is extremely poor in quality?
I can't blame Spolsky for making a connection between


Software today is more powerful than that produced in the past.  By
some metrics it may be of poorer quality - by others it clearly isn't.
And I don't know how you make a metric for 'most software is of
extremely poor quality' without some such comparison, as I can't see
any obvious metric.


  User annoyance. :)

   A) many college graduates don't display knowledge of basic software
      concepts


If that's the case you have serious problems.  We used to have things
called examinations which helped.


  I don't dispute that most college curricula have serious problems.
That was another of Spolsky's points, IIRC.  (BTW, as you probably know,
I'm a college student right now, so I /do/ speak from experience. Pulling
the "In myyy day, we had to..." routine is only going to elicit one of
two responses from me: either your memories are tainted by nostalgia, or
else you really /did/ get a better education than the average U.S. grad
today. Neither interpretation is inconsistent with what I'm saying.)


I think there are sufficient concepts accessible by way of Java to
gauge a programmer's capability.  (Indeed, given that Java is a general
purpose language, this is an argument that is inescapable in pure logic
terms.)

Spolsky thinks there /aren't/ sufficient etc. etc. (He, and certainly
I, dismiss the "purely logical" argument about Turing-completeness as a
red herring. Surely you wouldn't try to gauge a programmer's advanced knowledge if all he knew was Visual Basic or Brainf**k, would you? Languages are /not/ all created equal.)


   This is a point you (Gerry) have been stubbornly ignoring through
this whole thread --- students are lazy. If they can write Visual Basic
code in Java, they will. This is how so many students come to the
200-level courses, even at CMU, unable to write 'atoi'.


An ASCII to integer function can easily be done in VB or Java.  Why not
set it as an assignment?


  (A) Because we already have six labs to get through this semester,
and the TAs can't grade fast enough.
  (B) Because it's provided by the standard library, anyway, so who
cares? and you'd have to make up special constraints to confound the
smart alecks who turn in "return I.toString();".
  (C) Because it's completely worked out in the textbook, so it would
be more profitable to copy that code for an A than work it out yourself,
make a dumb mistake, and get a B.
  (D) Because there are subtle issues with integer overflow that make a
completely correct implementation beyond the capabilities of the average
student. We can't teach them <limits.h> (or Java's equivalent static
members) --- we need the whole semester to teach a basic grasp of the
/important/ stuff.
  (E) Because the instructor and TAs aren't trained in debugging, so
they can't tell a correct implementation from one that only works for
positive numbers less than 1000. (And don't even suggest that they read
the code! Code is hard to read, and we're behind schedule by a week
already.)

  ...Are you satisfied yet? I can give you more examples, taken from
real life.


   Right --- because /supporting/ recursion is a far cry from /encouraging/
recursion. The average student will never learn to fish by being put
out on a lake that /supports/ fishing; they need firm guidance. (And
no, you can't entirely blame the teachers. A lot of teachers are bad,
but it's better that a bad teacher teach Lisp than a bad teacher teach
Java, and there appears to be a shortage of good teachers at the moment.)


I don't see any real evidence for this assertion.  The 'New Math' was
based on the same sort of concept ('they'll learn bad habits if they
start with arithmetic'), and that didn't work out too well.

Okay, maybe a bad teacher teaching Lisp /would/ be worse than a bad teacher teaching Java. I'll let that one go.


[1] - Also consider that Spolsky, as one of the "elite," isn't necessarily
thinking of future application-software drones. His argument applies even
more forcefully to future visionaries --- the ones who are going to make
your life easier with totally original paradigms, whether it be a new
language, a new operating system, a new compression or network protocol,
or a new kind of computer altogether.


Those will likely be proficient in more than one language by the time
they come to college.


  Part of the "American Dream" is the naive idea that we can teach anyone
to be a visionary, even those bright youngsters who spent their
high-school years in the Big Blue Room with Poor Climate Control
instead of hunkered in front of a computer screen, like me. ;)
  Not everyone learns several languages before college --- so college
ought to be the place where they /do/ learn them.

  You know, I think we agree on all the major points; you just don't
like Spolsky's and my Java-bashing, and I don't like your lack of
cynicism regarding the U.S. educational system. :)

-Arthur
.

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