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Haskell vs Java job applicants
21–24 of 24 posts
Re: Haskell vs Java job applicants
#22It's still silly to hire a "Blub Programmer", regardless of whether Blub is Haskell or Java.
What if its for a blub job, say, maintaining 20-year-old billing systems? There's no value proposition in doing a rewrite, and the Haskell guy would get bored silly, while the blub guy would be content, and plug away, doing solid work for years. He makes a career out of it. And he was cheap. Everyone wins. It happens all the time. It's perfectly reasonable to hire a blub programmer. Whether it's reasonable to be a blub programmer is a different story. :)
Re: Haskell vs Java job applicants
#23I wouldn't say that just because someone knows Haskell they are suddenly a good programmer. Some schools use Haskell for their intro programming classes nowadays.
I would say that there are many more that don't even offer Haskell at the advanced level, or at best, offer one or two classes in the entire curriculum that use it.
In Sweden I know Chalmers teaches funcional programming as an obligatory first year course and functional programming is traditionally strong there.
In Lund it is taught as an advanced course and not obligatory.
Java seems to be the default language.
Re: Haskell vs Java job applicants
#24It's still silly to hire a "Blub Programmer", regardless of whether Blub is Haskell or Java.
What if its for a blub job, say, maintaining 20-year-old billing systems? There's no value proposition in doing a rewrite, and the Haskell guy would get bored silly, while the blub guy would be content, and plug away, doing solid work for years. He makes a career out of it. And he was cheap. Everyone wins. It happens all the time. It's perfectly reasonable to hire a blub programmer. Whether it's reasonable to be a bl…
If someone is going to work for you for years then it's still silly to hire based on knowledge of a particular programming language. In your example I would focus my recruiting efforts on more fundamental skills and experience such as accounting, maintenance, troubleshooting, configuration management, and OO analysis. If I found a candidate with those abilities but no Java experience I would be happy to train her on Java (or whatever).