GeekSpeak Cheat Sheet

[Alex Tweedly]

At 11:05 25/10/2004 -0400, Troy Rollins wrote:

>As usual, I take on the role of devil's advocate.

Good role to take - someone always should do so.

>This thread makes me wonder what the goal is. It would seem to me that the 
>CS students have every right to "roll their eyes." Aren't these people 
>expected to go find programming jobs when they get out of school? They are 
>more likely to find a want-ad for programming in Sanskrit than Transcript. 
>I don't doubt they are looking more seriously at M$ tools like .NET. They 
>are probably hoping to be employed, and to leave college with skills which 
>make them employable. If they are rolling their eyes, I would say they 
>probably have a good sense of reality.

They're undergrads in a CS degree course.  They're not in a six-month 
vocational course to teach them to program. They should be getting an 
education to set them up for 20+ years in computing and computational 
science - not just to help them find their first job.

A CS degree should (IMO) contain at least as much theory of computation, as 
much algorithm and program design issues, as much GUI considerations, as 
much .... etc. as it does how to write programs in this year's or this 
decade's fashionable language.

Of course, I say this in my role as crusty old man who still thinks that 
the most useful course he did in high school was Latin, and the most useful 
in undergrad was Logic and Philosophy of Science :-)

>Rev, and the like are tools better suited to K-12 learning, and 
>independent "problem solvers" (like most of us) than college CS majors 
>preparing for the job market.
>
>I have to wonder if this whole thing is meant to serve the teachers and 
>acedemia life - because Rev is easy to teach, rather than the students, 
>who will likely be mighty PO'd if convinced and coerced into spending time 
>and money learning techniques and syntax which simply don't apply in the 
>business world outside of the very fringe.
>
>I'm not debating the power that Rev can have... heck, I use it. BUT, it 
>isn't going to help me land a job at a corporation's IT department. Unless 
>this course is something like "Alternative programming techniques 101" and 
>an elective, similar to "music appreciation", I'd seriously have to wonder 
>who it was aimed to benefit.

"won't help you land a job in a corporate ..."
I don't know about that - there are corporations seeking Python programmers 
to work in Java - because the extra breadth has a positive correlation with 
future productivity. In the past 12 years or so, I have hired around 30 or 
40 new graduates (divided between US and UK); admittedly most of them have 
been Master or rather than Bachelor degree holders - but even so, the 
biggest difficulty for me was finding something to differentiate them. I 
wouldn't much care *which* other languages they knew about - but I'd 
definitely be more interested in someone who could describe a number of 
computer languages, and say something intelligent (or even just convincing 
:-) about the differences between them and why different problems were 
better handled by different tools - that was one of my standard "interview 
questions" that I asked most candidates. That's for hiring into a software 
development / engineering group - those looking to go into IT may have 
different experiences.

-- Alex.