3 posts tagged “rant”

Whereas Joel Spolsky thought recursion and pointers were the measure of eliteness when it came to computer programmers, Steve Yegge has chosen to be more specific, saying the real key is compilers .  I think I agree with Joel more that the fundamental theories are the key.  Steve puts too much emphasis on one facet of many in the realm of computer science application.  I took the compilers class and I understand compilers, but there's a lot of other CS out there that doesn't necessarily use compilers which still requires very good programming.

In any case, one thing they can agree on is abusive insults towards Java and Web 2.0...they are, after all, both very smart guys. ;o)  From Yegge,

Designing an effective undergrad CS degree is hard. It's no wonder so many ivy-league schools have more or less given up and turned into Java Certification shops.

If you're a conscientious CS student, you'll at least take OS and AI. You may come out without knowing exactly how compilers work, which is unfortunate, but there will be many problem domains in which you can deliver at least as much value as all the other people just like you. That's something to feel good about, or at least as good as everyone else feels at any rate.

Go team.

Most programmers these days, sadly, just want the degree. They don't care what they learn. They want a degree so they can get a job so they can pay the bills.

Most programmers gravitate towards a set of courses that can best be described as the olive-garden of computer science: the places where dumb programmers go to learn smart programmer stuff.

I hesitate to name these courses explicitly. I wouldn't be agile enough to dodge the game of graphic bloodshed aimed at me by animated, project-managing, object-oriented engineers using Java and Web 2.0 technologies to roast me via user interfaces designed rationally through teamwork and modern software methodologies. I'd become a case study in the ethics of software and its impact on our culture.

I don't have anything against Java as a language for implementing things...

I have ruminated and ranted about Java for a while now.  Just yesterday I stumbled across a Joel on Software article that made me shout, "that's exactly what I've been saying!":  Perils of Java

For starters, Java is too easy:

The lucky kids of JavaSchools are never going to get weird segfaults trying to implement pointer-based hash tables. They're never going to go stark, raving mad trying to pack things into bits. They'll never have to get their head around how, in a purely functional program, the value of a variable never changes, and yet, it changes all the time! A paradox!

They don't need that part of the brain to get a 4.0 in major.

And the fundamentals you miss by going to a javaschool *are* important:

Now, I freely admit that programming with pointers is not needed in 90% of the code written today, and in fact, it's downright dangerous in production code. OK. That's fine. And functional programming is just not used much in practice. Agreed.

But it's still important for some of the most exciting programming jobs. Without pointers, for example, you'd never be able to work on the Linux kernel. You can't understand a line of code in Linux, or, indeed, any operating system, without really understanding pointers.

Without understanding functional programming, you can't invent MapReduce, the algorithm that makes Google so massively scalable. The terms Map and Reduce come from Lisp and functional programming. MapReduce is, in retrospect, obvious to anyone who remembers from their lisp/scheme class that purely functional programs have no side effects and are thus trivially parallelizable....

But beyond the prima-facie importance of pointers and recursion, their real value is that building big systems requires the kind of mental flexibility you get from learning about them, and the mental aptitude you need to avoid being weeded out of the courses in which they are taught. Pointers and recursion require a certain ability to reason, to think in abstractions, and, most importantly, to view a problem at several levels of abstraction simultaneously. And thus, the ability to understand pointers and recursion is directly correlated with the ability to be a great programmer.

That's a good start.  I also think the ability to understand predicate-logic based code (i.e. Prolog) is correlated with being an even greater programmer. ;o)

As an employer, Joel complains that Java is not weeding out the mediocre programmer.

For me,  find it particularly annoying when Javaschool graduates extol Java and denigrate C++ and other "old" languages as antiquated crap.  From their perspective, a devotee of a language such as Scheme is just behind the times, and not enlightened to deeper patterns in programming.

The reality is pretty much every application you rely upon on a daily basis is written in C/C++.  To give a short list:  OS, browser, outlook, word processor, photoshop/illustrator, instant-messenger, ITunes, powerpoint, acrobat...I'm just reading the list of apps currently running on my machine. ;o)

From my way of looking at it, there are 3 major "languages" in play on the client-side of websites.  The server-side can have about 400trillion variants, but the client side is much more limited.  We gots HTML, CSS, and Javascript.  Those 3 technologies combined make up all the webpage content on every page on the web (minus proprietary plugins that are themselves just scaffolded in html, such as flash/virtools/flex etc...and maybe some old vbscript lying around (shudder)).

I'm gonna cruise right past 2 of them, because in my opinion they are adequate.  HTML and CSS.  HTML has been relegated to a fairly simple scaffolding role, and CSS is sweet (if browsers would fuckin implement properly).

That leaves one ugly duckling: Javascript.  I'm sure the committee that first made EcmaScript never dreamed it would transform into such a poorly-named, disparate and ugly mess.

Javascript needs a successor, or an overhaul, or to be taken out back and shot (works for me).  Javascript fills in what i'd call the "logic" part of the client-side controller/view layer. (the controller layer i think is split across the net now...some on server, some on client...i'll write about that later).

Of the logic your browser is performing, there's 3 (the little 3) aspects that I think are fundamental.  There's the language itself (Javascript), the method to communicate with the server, (AJAX), and the interface to control the CSS/HTML on the page on the fly (DOM).  The point of all 3 are really to make things happen in the browser without having to travel across the web and fetch a whole new page from the server.

We need a new 3.  Javascript/AJAX/DOM won't do.  We need options.  These 3 all suck.  They are not filling their role nearly as elegantly and CSS/HTML.