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A new CS student states his opinion on why Scheme is a poor choice for intro CS. More interesting because of the attitude that comes across clearly: that "work
by dstorrs 17y ago
A new CS student states his opinion on why Scheme is a poor choice for intro CS. More interesting because of the attitude that comes across clearly: that "working" code is all that matters, not testing, commenting, or other maintainability elements. Hopefully his curriculum will explicitly address this issue.
- jacquesm 17y agoThe interesting thing here is that his attitude is quite representative of what I've seen in plenty of companies. Code that 'works' is treated as though it is holy because hardly anybody is around that worked on it originally and touching it is inviting disaster, because the comments are non-existent. In the 80s there were plenty of companies that made a substantial living out of selling system development courses, where you were taught how to do it 'properly'. This led to 12 lines of comments for every line of code, 100's of file folders full of ascii art that never were looked at. The pendulum for some reason never seems to stop in the middle.
- colanderman 17y agoI know the curriculum well. He won't pass if he doesn't change.