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Most disrespectful language to teach people who pay to be job ready.

PhilipRoman 2y ago
I think we really need to separate the two aspects of CS education. Universities should not be job training centers and vice versa. We already have bootcamps, etc. which provide very practical training. I'm pretty sure that CS is the only field with complaints about not being practical enough. Mathematics, physics, medicine, etc. all manage to get along fine.
ashton314 2y ago
Being “job ready” (whatever that means) is a side-effect and a byproduct of a university education, not the end. The telos is to teach you how to learn and think well. In this regard Racket is almost as good as you can get. (I’d personally rank the Shplait language (new; implemented in Racket/Rhombus) as best for teaching.) Anyone who learns Racket will have learned ways of deconstructing problems that will make them far superior in problem solving to those who learn only e.g. Java and only know how to do things the OO™ way.
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mrkeen 2y ago
Where else can merit find a home? When a Harvard dropout writes a small system in PHP, and needs to call in the big guns to try to unfuck the situation [1], who should he call? Someone who got really good at jQuery at university? Besides, aren't modern mainstream languages bragging about having nothing to learn? Learn go in just a couple of days, etc.? [1] https://engineering.fb.com/2014/03/20/developer-tools/hack-a-new-programming-language-for-hhvm/ https://engineering.fb.com/2014/03/20/developer-tools/hack-a...
cafard 2y ago
I will say that the credential was a big part of why I studied CS in my 30s. I learned a number of languages along the way. At this point, nearly all the code I write is in JScript, Pl/SQL, Python, and T-SQL. I learned none of these while in school: Javascript was not yet invented when I was getting the degree. I will say that SNOBOL, of all odd languages, was useful to me after school in learning Perl.

I think we really need to separate the two aspects of CS education. Universities should not be job training centers and vice versa. We already have bootcamps, etc. which provide very practical training. I'm pretty sure that CS is the only field with complaints about not being practical enough. Mathematics, physics, medicine, etc. all manage to get along fine.

ashton314 2y ago

Being “job ready” (whatever that means) is a side-effect and a byproduct of a university education, not the end. The telos is to teach you how to learn and think well. In this regard Racket is almost as good as you can get. (I’d personally rank the Shplait language (new; implemented in Racket/Rhombus) as best for teaching.) Anyone who learns Racket will have learned ways of deconstructing problems that will make them far superior in problem solving to those who learn only e.g. Java and only know how to do things the OO™ way.

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mrkeen 2y ago

Where else can merit find a home? When a Harvard dropout writes a small system in PHP, and needs to call in the big guns to try to unfuck the situation [1], who should he call? Someone who got really good at jQuery at university? Besides, aren't modern mainstream languages bragging about having nothing to learn? Learn go in just a couple of days, etc.? [1] https://engineering.fb.com/2014/03/20/developer-tools/hack-a-new-programming-language-for-hhvm/ https://engineering.fb.com/2014/03/20/developer-tools/hack-a...

cafard 2y ago

I will say that the credential was a big part of why I studied CS in my 30s. I learned a number of languages along the way. At this point, nearly all the code I write is in JScript, Pl/SQL, Python, and T-SQL. I learned none of these while in school: Javascript was not yet invented when I was getting the degree. I will say that SNOBOL, of all odd languages, was useful to me after school in learning Perl.