Where have the universities gone? [LWN.net]

Where have the universities gone?

Posted Jul 25, 2007 16:53 UTC (Wed) by mikov (subscriber, #33179)
In reply to: Where have the universities gone? by ms
Parent article: Where have the universities gone?

There are exceptions, of course. Perhaps for financial programming in Cobol, or for mainframe development, or simply for very smart people who can grasp the principles without actually using them, etc.

But look at it this way: 99% of all PC software, not to mention _all_ PC OS-es, system libraries, etc, are written in C or C++. Can you explain how someone can understand and program reasonably in this environment without knowing C ?

Additionally, C is not _that_ hard. Refusing (or worse - not being able) to learn it, strikes me as very surprising given C's absolute dominance. One doesn't really need to be a C wizard. It is like not being able to read, because there are audio books. Or like developing software without having any knowledge of English. Simply cannot happen.

You say that you don't know C yourself, but I strongly suspect you actually do. Even if you don't actually develop software in C, you probably can read and understand C source code, no ?

On a practical note, what language would a hypothetical professional programmer in a PC environment use ? There are not that many choices. Further, it is actually impossible to develop any sufficiently complex piece of software in a different language without ever falling back to C. C#, Java, Python, Lisp, Haskel, ML, whatever - none of them have 100% of libraries and operations that would ever be needed.

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