Let Go, Standard Library From Community

[Sean Kelly]

Stephen Waits wrote:
> David B. Held wrote:
>>
>> compiler actually does.  The "Java Syndrome" helps students treat the 
> 
> Ahh, thanks for giving it a name.  I'll add that to our vocabulary here.
> 
> We've been seeing this get worse and worse in the past 5 years.  It's to 
> the point now where entry-level candidates we interview, from some 
> high-profile schools, cannot write a basic recursive function 
> (factorial) or demonstrate any knowledge about pointers, memory, or 
> anything to do with bits.

I have had similar problems interviewing new graduates who learned with 
Java rather than C++.  Fortunately, it's not universal.  One interviewee 
I remember was taught using Java but reasoned correctly about the C/C++ 
questions using their knowledge of architecture.  I've never had an 
interviewee do that before, even the ones who know C/C++.

> Basically, seems like the students aren't learning much about the 
> machine any more.  Were they ever?  Or were us "old-timers" (I'm 35, not 
> quite an old timer, but whatever) just so excited about the whole thing 
> that we all spent way too much time learning stuff on our own?  (I also 
> quit college so I could learn more

Well, I think it is less important what a student is taught than what 
they learn ;-)  But simple exposure to explicit memory management, 
stack-based vs. dynamic data, etc, makes a noticeable difference.  If 
nothing else, the average graduate taught with C, C++, or Pascal will 
have some basic concept of what it means for data to be on the stack vs. 
the heap.

> I fear for some of the guys coming through here, that some day they may 
> find themselves inside a paper bag.

Same here.  However, if a field doesn't interest someone enough to 
inspire them to learn about it on their own time then they are probably 
in the wrong field.  If someone is pursuing CS for the money, they are 
in for a disappointment.


Sean