Joel Spolsky: The Perils of JavaSchools

Joel Spolsky: The Perils of JavaSchools.

The recruiters-who-use-grep, by the way, are ridiculed here, and for good reason. I have never met anyone who can do Scheme, Haskell, and C pointers who can't pick up Java in two days, and create better Java code than people with five years of experience in Java, but try explaining that to the average HR drone.

Plus, this struck a chord with me:

But JavaSchools also fail to train the brains of kids to be adept, agile, and flexible enough to do good software design (and I don't mean OO "design", where you spend countless hours rewriting your code to rejiggle your object hierarchy, or you fret about faux "problems" like has-a vs. is-a)...

OOP in school consists mostly of memorizing a bunch of vocabulary terms like "encapsulation" and "inheritance" and taking multiple-choice quizzicles on the difference between polymorphism and overloading.

I feel like that's what it is to some people in the real world too. One time I had a one-off Java class used internally in some code to hold a few fields of data; really just a "struct", and not part of any public interface at all. I was told to "encapsulate" the class. I said, "Huh? Oh, you mean add some getters and setters?", and thought "Ok then".

Oh, and Joel's programming test was actually pretty fun.

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19:24 (utc-5)
edited: 19:27 (utc-5)

 

Back from Canada

Back from Canada. Fun! Got to snowmobile (going as fast as cars on the highway next to me). Pictures coming.

Couche Tard! Tremblah!

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16:42 (utc-5)