3 ms·

As someone who programs only as an amateur I honestly find baffling the whole idea that a university would teach students any programming language. Shouldn’t th

As someone who programs only as an amateur I honestly find baffling the whole idea that a university would teach students any programming language. Shouldn’t they be learning concepts, algorithms, data structures? Isn’t the language just a tool? I’d think mere technicians would learn languages. University-educated scientists should learn the underlying theory with which they can learn ANY language. I am a lawyer. I didn’t learn Westlaw or Lexis in law school. I mean yes, I did use them and was trained in them. But they were just tools. But no one would say “what computer research system should we teach our students?” And good thing—the ones I used in law school are now obsolete! Even as a lawyer I can teach myself programming languages. Man I’d be disappointed if I went into a university CS course and they’re debating something as low level as what language to teach me, rather than teaching me how to learn any language and how to design new ones.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
>Isn’t the language just a tool? Yes. But to learn the data structures and algorithms you have to practice coding them. What language do you code them in to teach them? After awhile most code looks the same.
riwsky 6y ago
“As some who legalizes only as an amateur I honestly find baffling the whole idea that a law school would teach students any particular nation or jurisdiction’s legal code. Shouldn’t they be learning concepts, rhetoric, and logic? Isn’t a case law just a tool? I think mere technicians would learn legal precedent. University-educated lawyers should learn the underlying theory with which they can learn ANY case law. I am a software engineer. I didn’t learn RequireJS or CommonJS in school. I mean yes, I did use them and was trained in them. But they were just tools. But no one would say ‘what JS module system should we teach our students?’ And good thing—the ones I used in school are now obsolete! Even as a software engineer I can read court opinions. Man I’d be disappointed if I went into a law school and they’re debating something as low level as what jurisdiction’s laws and court decisions to teach me, rather than teaching me how to interpret any law or legal argument and how to design new ones.” I hear what you’re saying, software engineer, but avoiding any particular set of case law would leave these lawyers extremely unprepared for professional practice—not just because they will likely work in one of those legal codes otherwise covered by the school, but because those codes and the arguments that shaped them constitute an immense base of empirical knowledge about legal rhetoric, logic, and concepts that simply cannot be replicated in a vacuum. Accordingly, those excellent judges and legislators who do the novel work of lawmaking and legal argument are _not_ reduced to technicians by their knowledge of case law. In fact, I’d say it’s the opposite: it is impossible to have a good grasp of the theoretical underpinnings without also having extreme facility in one legal code or another as a ‘native tongue’.
carapace 6y ago
It's an open secret in the IT industry that if you are smart enough to be a good programmer and you want to be well-paid you should become a lawyer.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
  Surely lawyers don’t make that much that they can have a better quality of life compared with a programmer earning good money from a wealthy market and living in a country with a relatively low cost of living? I mean, programmers can live and work anywhere. Lawyers can’t.
  - carapace 6y ago
    When I was looking into it back in the day the salary spreads for programmers and lawyers didn't overlap very much. A good programmer could get ~$250k max while a good lawyer starts at around ~$300k. This was also before remote work was so much a thing, eh? > I mean, programmers can live and work anywhere. Yes and no. YMMV
mumblemumble 6y ago
It's sort of inescapable, because there's some baseline level of tooling that needs to be supplied to the students to that they can learn the actual subject matter of the course. As a practical example, in my graduate program, there were some courses where the professors handled a lot of those baseline details, and courses where the professors gave a lot of leeway to the students. My observation was that the latter courses couldn't go nearly as deep into the official topic of the course. Students would spend so much time managing their programming environments that it became a serious distraction. Also, in reference to your question, "Isn't the language just a tool?" - no, it isn't just a tool. It's also a language. For a professional software engineer, the programming language isn't just a way of telling a computer what to do; it's also the primary, and most authoritative, medium by which you communicate complex technical information to your colleagues. It's perhaps comparable to the divide between informal language and legal language - one is useful, especially for communicating to people with limited expertise in the field, but the other is where the rubber actually meets the road.
giantDinosaur 6y ago
The most natural parallel is something you know implicitly: your native (or highly advanced second) language. It's not taught at law school, because it's assumed. Obviously you can teach law in any language, but you need to have a common base to apply and write down concepts, and that's the programming language to the university course.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

>Isn’t the language just a tool? Yes. But to learn the data structures and algorithms you have to practice coding them. What language do you code them in to teach them? After awhile most code looks the same.

riwsky 6y ago

“As some who legalizes only as an amateur I honestly find baffling the whole idea that a law school would teach students any particular nation or jurisdiction’s legal code. Shouldn’t they be learning concepts, rhetoric, and logic? Isn’t a case law just a tool? I think mere technicians would learn legal precedent. University-educated lawyers should learn the underlying theory with which they can learn ANY case law. I am a software engineer. I didn’t learn RequireJS or CommonJS in school. I mean yes, I did use them and was trained in them. But they were just tools. But no one would say ‘what JS module system should we teach our students?’ And good thing—the ones I used in school are now obsolete! Even as a software engineer I can read court opinions. Man I’d be disappointed if I went into a law school and they’re debating something as low level as what jurisdiction’s laws and court decisions to teach me, rather than teaching me how to interpret any law or legal argument and how to design new ones.” I hear what you’re saying, software engineer, but avoiding any particular set of case law would leave these lawyers extremely unprepared for professional practice—not just because they will likely work in one of those legal codes otherwise covered by the school, but because those codes and the arguments that shaped them constitute an immense base of empirical knowledge about legal rhetoric, logic, and concepts that simply cannot be replicated in a vacuum. Accordingly, those excellent judges and legislators who do the novel work of lawmaking and legal argument are _not_ reduced to technicians by their knowledge of case law. In fact, I’d say it’s the opposite: it is impossible to have a good grasp of the theoretical underpinnings without also having extreme facility in one legal code or another as a ‘native tongue’.

carapace 6y ago

It's an open secret in the IT industry that if you are smart enough to be a good programmer and you want to be well-paid you should become a lawyer.

yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
Surely lawyers don’t make that much that they can have a better quality of life compared with a programmer earning good money from a wealthy market and living in a country with a relatively low cost of living? I mean, programmers can live and work anywhere. Lawyers can’t.
- carapace 6y ago
  When I was looking into it back in the day the salary spreads for programmers and lawyers didn't overlap very much. A good programmer could get ~$250k max while a good lawyer starts at around ~$300k. This was also before remote work was so much a thing, eh? > I mean, programmers can live and work anywhere. Yes and no. YMMV

mumblemumble 6y ago

It's sort of inescapable, because there's some baseline level of tooling that needs to be supplied to the students to that they can learn the actual subject matter of the course. As a practical example, in my graduate program, there were some courses where the professors handled a lot of those baseline details, and courses where the professors gave a lot of leeway to the students. My observation was that the latter courses couldn't go nearly as deep into the official topic of the course. Students would spend so much time managing their programming environments that it became a serious distraction. Also, in reference to your question, "Isn't the language just a tool?" - no, it isn't just a tool. It's also a language. For a professional software engineer, the programming language isn't just a way of telling a computer what to do; it's also the primary, and most authoritative, medium by which you communicate complex technical information to your colleagues. It's perhaps comparable to the divide between informal language and legal language - one is useful, especially for communicating to people with limited expertise in the field, but the other is where the rubber actually meets the road.

giantDinosaur 6y ago

The most natural parallel is something you know implicitly: your native (or highly advanced second) language. It's not taught at law school, because it's assumed. Obviously you can teach law in any language, but you need to have a common base to apply and write down concepts, and that's the programming language to the university course.