Keith Devens .com

Except a little easy, don't you think? I mean, The accumulator was about the trickiest thing in there and that's pretty much par for the course, right?

Also sprach Keith. Hich!

Sure it was easy, but it gave me a little bit of brain exercise so it was fun.

I wanted to say this in the post but wasn't sure how to without sounding condescending. I find it hard to believe that programmers could have trouble with recursion or pointers. I know some people would, but programmers? Though I have to defer to Joel since he's obviously interviewed a lot more people than I have.

What J.S. is really bitching about is that American universities stopped providing a well-rounded, liberal education and transmogrified into expensive trade schools. This was to meet the expectation that people would be graduated with the mundane skills needed to make them useful on a day-to-day basis in the business world. The concept of "learning how to learn" has fallen by the wayside.

Java is popular in the schools now because it is popular in the business world. But building massively distributed systems for Google is not what most programmers will find themselves doing after college. The fact is that most will be asked to build a new accounting system in Java if they want to get a paycheck.