Where have the universities gone?

Where have the universities gone?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 6:18 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Where have the universities gone? by mikov
Parent article: Where have the universities gone?

So, if teachers and students in universities don't know C well, that means only one thing - that they are both sadly incompetent.

Why so ? C is easy, almost trivial. The CS is hard. Pointers are hard (and you can conjure classical pointer-related problems in FORTRAN with one array). I know of one guy who was hired as C++ programmer by Google who knew nothing about C (let alone C++) - but he knew CS, Pascal+Assembler and little Lisp. And Google's standards are pretty high.

I remember my own unfortunate CS education 12 years ago. We hard courses in ML, Pascal and a tiny bit of C and C++. It was ridiculous, and I can say outright that I learned zero about programming during my days in the university.

That's not a problem of language. The important courses learn about algorithms and basic principles. You can learn any language by just buying book and reading it. But paradigms - these are harder. These must be taught.

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