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I thought it was strange that Functional Programming ranked high. In my experiences CS depts are pretty mixed, in some schools it's essential, but in many othe
by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I thought it was strange that Functional Programming ranked high. In my experiences CS depts are pretty mixed, in some schools it's essential, but in many others it's all but ignored. Additionally when I list out all the people I know who are big into fp on twitter or else where, at least anecdotally, it seems to be pretty heavily skewed towards the self-taught. I have a mixed background (self-taught then back to school) but all of my fp work has been on my own time an curiosity. I've always found it rather ironic that FP is considered academic when very few academics spend their time on it.
- troels 16y agoOdd indeed. Javascript and Ruby are quite FP (At least in the lisp sense of FP) and they are predominantly hacker languages, meaning that they are used more by self-taught programmers than CS graduates.
- dougws 16y agoOkay, there are some gigantic generalizations being made here, both in this post and others. I'm currently a senior at a liberal arts school, majoring in CS. Of the 10 or so CS majors in my class, I'd say half are also "hackers" in that they spend significant free time programming outside of class, for work and for fun. All of these people know at least one of {Ruby,Javascript} (Ruby happens to be less popular around here than Python since the latter is taught in intro classes). Not coincidentally, these people are also at the top of the department and are having the most success applying to grad school AND jobs. I guess my point is that the hacker/academic distinction is not necessarily as broad as one would think reading some of these comments, and that many of us CS types think of ourselves as hackers as well as academics.
- troels 16y agoThanks for correcting me - You're quite right.