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Nothing trains people to program well. Colleges teach fundamentals like lambda calculus, but fail to teach practical skills. Bootcamps have the opposite problem

Nothing trains people to program well. Colleges teach fundamentals like lambda calculus, but fail to teach practical skills. Bootcamps have the opposite problem, and the actual industry seems to assume that trained developers spring up out of the ground like sowing dragon's teeth. The requirement of 'not focused on a particular language' is actually something that I would be forced to disagree with. That leads to things like HAGGIS[0]. Generally we can probably say that determining whether people can program is difficult at best, but HackerRank[1] seems to have a good model. Problems are given in English with examples of input and output, and the testee may select from some five dozen supported languages. Programs use standard inputs and outputs. Alternately I would support the use of a standard language. People do okay with computers even though they're not really Turing machines; it would not be harmful to concede conceptual purity to satisfy some real-world constraint. Python or Ruby would probably be fine. In a bootcamp environment I'm afraid it would have to be JavaScript. Either way, the part about "more practical" conflicts with the "not focused on a particular language" part, and the right answer is whatever is furthest from HAGGIS. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAGGIS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAGGIS [1] https://www.hackerrank.com https://www.hackerrank.com

AndyMcConachie 9y ago
I didn't know abotu HAGGIS, thanks for that link. I vaguely remember that in the 1990's the US Advanced Placement test for CS was done in Pascal. The point has to be a focus on fundamentals. There are fundamental data structures and algorithms that any programmer is useless if they don't know, and I doubt people are learning these at bootcamps in 6 months. > Colleges teach fundamentals like lambda calculus, but fail to teach practical skills. College CS programs in the USA are focusing more and more on appeasing recruiters and HR folk with keywords than in teaching CS fundamentals. And I think that's a tragedy.
- sethrin 9y ago
  > College CS programs in the USA are focusing more and more on appeasing recruiters and HR folk with keywords than in teaching CS fundamentals. And I think that's a tragedy. If true, I am sure we would agree on that score. > There are fundamental data structures and algorithms that any programmer is useless if they don't know, and I doubt people are learning these at bootcamps in 6 months. I believe that what gets taught at bootcamps is how to tackle new things, and professional standards of code quality. More learning how to learn. I do dispute the idea of "any programmer is useless if they don't know X" for any X. It's too strongly worded, for one thing. If you qualify 'programmer' as someone with 4-6 languages under their belt then yes, if that person doesn't know their algorithms they're probably going to be less productive -- writing BASIC in every language. That is unfortunately far from useless. But the subset of coding tasks you'd assign to junior developers are probably not going to inconvenience you much if you don't know how to do an A* search.

AndyMcConachie 9y ago

I didn't know abotu HAGGIS, thanks for that link. I vaguely remember that in the 1990's the US Advanced Placement test for CS was done in Pascal. The point has to be a focus on fundamentals. There are fundamental data structures and algorithms that any programmer is useless if they don't know, and I doubt people are learning these at bootcamps in 6 months. > Colleges teach fundamentals like lambda calculus, but fail to teach practical skills. College CS programs in the USA are focusing more and more on appeasing recruiters and HR folk with keywords than in teaching CS fundamentals. And I think that's a tragedy.

sethrin 9y ago
> College CS programs in the USA are focusing more and more on appeasing recruiters and HR folk with keywords than in teaching CS fundamentals. And I think that's a tragedy. If true, I am sure we would agree on that score. > There are fundamental data structures and algorithms that any programmer is useless if they don't know, and I doubt people are learning these at bootcamps in 6 months. I believe that what gets taught at bootcamps is how to tackle new things, and professional standards of code quality. More learning how to learn. I do dispute the idea of "any programmer is useless if they don't know X" for any X. It's too strongly worded, for one thing. If you qualify 'programmer' as someone with 4-6 languages under their belt then yes, if that person doesn't know their algorithms they're probably going to be less productive -- writing BASIC in every language. That is unfortunately far from useless. But the subset of coding tasks you'd assign to junior developers are probably not going to inconvenience you much if you don't know how to do an A* search.