I've not found a college on the planet that graduates good programmers. It's something you have to learn from experience, and a college curriculum simply inclu

I've not found a college on the planet that graduates good programmers. It's something you have to learn from experience, and a college curriculum simply include enough large coding projects for people to become good. I regularly run across code in recommendations stuff written by Ivy League post docs and most of it's pretty bad, even if the ideas it implements are smart. I think that realizing that universities can't effectively teach programming should be at the root of choosing which programming languages are used in computer science instruction. In college you get loaded up with the right concepts that will later facilitate you as a programmer, and I think languages chosen should be languages that are geared to that end. Perhaps the most instructive thing I've seen for student programmers, and which pays to boot, is Google's Summer of Code. That throws students in with a bunch of brutally honest and usually seasoned hackers and makes them fare for their own for a summer.