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Being confidently programming language agnostic

blog.bradfieldcs.com

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Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic

#71

Post by chrisfosterelli »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #32
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #2

I know formal education often gets a lot of criticism around HN, but I think the approach the article is talking about is heavily mirrored in most university computer science curriculums. Universities tend to focus on paradigms and patterns, and typically force a student to learn at least 3 languages throughout their education (much more if they want to). Just in my undergrad I learned C, C++, C#, Objective C, Swift,…

> Universities tend to focus on paradigms and patterns... > ...That's of course not to say you can't do the exact same sort of education without going to school... I think the personal motivation that someone brings has a lot to do with how they fare short term and long term in this regard. Yes, a good University program will teach you the concepts and underlying theory expressed by language implementations; coming o…

I think that's great, and I agree completely. I added that last sentence because I think at the end of the day your education is what you make of it, regardless of whether you went to school for it or not.

Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic

#72

Post by semi-extrinsic »

WildUtah wrote: post #59
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I probably program in all languages like a C programmer As the old "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL" article says, > The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.

Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language. That's why Haskell exists. It's the computer scientists' best attempt so far to create a language in which it's impossible to write FORTRAN programs.

I dunno, combining the do statement, the forM_ monad, I think I could write some good Fortran.

Haskell also appears to have a very interesting form of goto:

https://wiki.haskell.org/Compose#Using_Cont

With Haskell's advanced type system, could we recreate implicit int/real typing, and perhaps even EQUIVALENCE?

Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic

#73

Post by dahart »

general_ai wrote: post #51
dahart wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think universities produce people who don't care about performance and aren't educated about low level mechanics? That's an honest question, I'm not challenging your experience. I don't know what your experience is, of course. In my experience, people with CS degrees do understand the low level mechanics statistically more often, on average, than people who don't have a formal education, or people who…

> What makes you think Personal experience. I've been trying to hire moderately competent, junior software engineers would be able to write and optimize C++ without much supervision. They're now more rare than the Sasquatch. Today, "caring about performance" means picking a language that's only 5x slower than C, rather than 100x slower. Hardly anyone even knows why alignment might be desirable, or how long it takes t…

> Personal experience. I've been trying to hire moderately competent, junior software engineers would be able to write and optimize C++ without much supervision. They're now more rare than the Sasquatch.

Are you certain they're rare? As opposed to not responding to your hiring ads, for whatever reason?

I do think the percentage of programmers who care about CPU cycles has gone down; I would totally agree with that. Decades ago it used to be that you had to care, it wasn't an option. Today, for most work, it's simply no longer a requirement to worry about cycles. BUT, I've hired lots of kids in recent years who knew plenty about compilers and assembly and caching, so I have a general feeling that they're out there. I would speculate that a lot of the kids who can deal with C++ and performance issues are interested in games...

> ...it definitely pays to know what's going on. Otherwise it's not software engineering, it's cargo cult science and rain dancing, prone to fall apart at the first sign of difficulty. It's like having a certified car mechanic who doesn't know how to open the hood.

It does pay to know what's going on, I totally agree. In some sense literally, as the deeper you go, the more "expert" and "high paid" you will expect the technician to be.

Your analogy to car mechanics is apt in the sense that what you're talking about has already happened in both the auto industry and the tech industry due to increasing complexity of the systems over time -- the first line or two of support people don't fix the internals for you and often don't know how (yet they do "fix" most problems). Even the higher paid expert technicians at car dealers can't fix a huge portion of the problems anymore because the problems are software. Same goes for very smart and very capable QA engineers - they know how to test systems, they know how to find which system is broken, they know how to reproduce issues, but the system may still be a black box. And the engineers writing your core app code still can't generally fix issues in their libraries or operating systems. And so on. So, I personally wouldn't go so far as to say it's cargo cult science or lacking software engineering, we just have more layers than we used to. We can and do engineer at one layer on top of other layers that are black boxes, almost nobody can claim otherwise. But, as you pointed out, you do need people staffing those multiple layers.

Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic

#74

Post by userbinator »

gravypod wrote: post #24
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #2

I know formal education often gets a lot of criticism around HN, but I think the approach the article is talking about is heavily mirrored in most university computer science curriculums. Universities tend to focus on paradigms and patterns, and typically force a student to learn at least 3 languages throughout their education (much more if they want to). Just in my undergrad I learned C, C++, C#, Objective C, Swift,…

I think the top-10 universities do it right and the rest don't. (This is a bit of an exaggeration but you most likely know what I mean). Most of my classmates don't usually "learn" a language. They do an assignment by copying, hammering at the computer, or just asking for help. The basis of how university is set up is antithetical to the learning and exploration of new programming languages. This is based on one simp…

Don't mandate a programming language for you assignments

I'd do them all in highly optimised x86 Asm, just because I can. ;-)

Not all students start at the same level; making the choice of language a free-for-all is just going to stretch that disparity even more. The ones at the top will naturally find ways to entertain themselves more, and the ones at the bottom will have no less idea of how to do things than copy-pasting code they found somewhere else (if the language doesn't matter, it makes that even easier...)

We were writing an interpreter using C++ which I'd rather have done in some Lisp-like languages.

On the other hand, I believe that doing something in an "unconventional" language for it is one way of improving your skills since you have to then apply true creativity and knowledge instead of just following an existing solution. Using a language which makes the task easy or even trivial doesn't really benefit the learning process.

Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic

#75

Post by userbinator »

lucidguppy wrote: post #36
SlySherZ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: I didn't watch the video yet and my opinion might change by then. C teaches you something very useful, which is how the computer works under the hood. Most things you do in C loosely match to what the computer does, and learning C helps you understanding the computer. I'm not saying that it's a good language to start with, but it's okay. Unlike C++. IMO, C++ is the worst possible language to start with. The rea…

The argument is that learning C before C++ teaches you how to program C++ wrong. Nothing more, nothing less. I wasn't judging C++ as a beginner language. I wasn't judging C either.

IMHO "wrong" being mostly the opinion of the evangelists who think C++ is a completely different language, and have been trying to push it in that direction, but it's still mostly C at the core with a thick layer of abstraction/indirection on top. Don't believe all the hype. "Climbing the ladder of abstraction" is the best way to learn how everything works.

Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic

#76

Post by delecti »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #60
no_wizard wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had no idea. I do appreciate this. I must of missed the 'splainer. I'll remember that for next time.

Just FYI, you can remove all the parameters from Amazon URLs and they still work. EG: https://www.amazon.com/Fluent-Python-Concise-Effective-Progr... You can also emit the title: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1491946008/ works fine.

And yet another trick for shortening Amazon links: http://amzn.com/1491946008

Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic

#77

Post by chrisfosterelli »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #35
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #2

I know formal education often gets a lot of criticism around HN, but I think the approach the article is talking about is heavily mirrored in most university computer science curriculums. Universities tend to focus on paradigms and patterns, and typically force a student to learn at least 3 languages throughout their education (much more if they want to). Just in my undergrad I learned C, C++, C#, Objective C, Swift,…

>My personal experience is that university grads are much better at adapting to new languages than someone with 4 years experience in only a single language. These benefits seem dubious to me in the long term unless you plan to work on compilers and languages which is certainly a noble goal and is very much a hot area right now. Picking up brainfuck in a short period of time is not really noteworthy IMO. I am also st…

> Do we want to value the ability to sprint or the ability to finish a marathon?

We want to value the ability to finish the marathon, which is exactly why it's important to be able to adapt faster. The industry is constantly moving, and someone who can learn new languages and technologies easier/faster is at a huge advantage.

For a concrete example, take Objective-C and Swift. Apple has made it pretty clear that's were things are going, and a developer who has C#, Haskell, Objective-C, Python, Rust, and Ruby experience is going to make that transition much better than a developer with just Objective-C experience. This same thing even applies to frameworks within the same language (think React/Redux and functional programming experience).

> Am I really going to commit time to reviewing all languages I choose to learn every year or so?

Definitely not! You focus on the concepts in the language and don't worry about memorizing anything. Quite a few years ago I learned Go for fun. I basically ignored it after that, but when I needed it for a project recently it came back very quick.

Those other questions you pointed out are, of course, very important. I think you learn the answer to those as you learn languages as well.

Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic

#78

Post by yellowapple »

WildUtah wrote: post #59
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I probably program in all languages like a C programmer As the old "Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL" article says, > The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language.

Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language. That's why Haskell exists. It's the computer scientists' best attempt so far to create a language in which it's impossible to write FORTRAN programs.

They accomplished that by creating a language in which it's impossible to write programs in general ;)

Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic

#79

Post by general_ai »

dahart wrote: post #73
general_ai wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes you think Personal experience. I've been trying to hire moderately competent, junior software engineers would be able to write and optimize C++ without much supervision. They're now more rare than the Sasquatch. Today, "caring about performance" means picking a language that's only 5x slower than C, rather than 100x slower. Hardly anyone even knows why alignment might be desirable, or how long it takes t…

> Personal experience. I've been trying to hire moderately competent, junior software engineers would be able to write and optimize C++ without much supervision. They're now more rare than the Sasquatch. Are you certain they're rare? As opposed to not responding to your hiring ads, for whatever reason? I do think the percentage of programmers who care about CPU cycles has gone down; I would totally agree with that. D…

> As opposed to not responding to your hiring ads

Could be response rate, sure. Could be our proximity to Google, which manages to hire C++ devs just fine (fully a half of their codebase is C++).

We've managed to hire some folks after all, with some remedial training they're doing fine. I just wish it wasn't so hard to find them, and they wouldn't require months of close supervision after you hire them.

Re: Being confidently programming language agnostic

#80

Post by gravypod »

userbinator wrote: post #74
gravypod wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the top-10 universities do it right and the rest don't. (This is a bit of an exaggeration but you most likely know what I mean). Most of my classmates don't usually "learn" a language. They do an assignment by copying, hammering at the computer, or just asking for help. The basis of how university is set up is antithetical to the learning and exploration of new programming languages. This is based on one simp…

Don't mandate a programming language for you assignments I'd do them all in highly optimised x86 Asm, just because I can. ;-) Not all students start at the same level; making the choice of language a free-for-all is just going to stretch that disparity even more. The ones at the top will naturally find ways to entertain themselves more, and the ones at the bottom will have no less idea of how to do things than copy-p…

> I'd do them all in highly optimised x86 Asm, just because I can. ;-)

I'd love to see someone do this because I'd say it'll be harder to do assignments I'd give out in x86 assembly then probably i686 or even ARM.

Most people would likely do everything in the language they want to learn or will need in industry. If you're just messing around then write it all in some obscure architecture like AP-101 or PDP-8 or even 4004. Maybe I just love the classics.

> Not all students start at the same level; making the choice of language a free-for-all is just going to stretch that disparity even more

That's why I said they should first be introduced to languages. That should be the first thing, day one, and continue until they get a basic idea of all the common features in programming languages.

> On the other hand, I believe that doing something in an "unconventional" language for it is one way of improving your skills since you have to then apply true creativity and knowledge instead of just following an existing solution

It may be fun but I wouldn't want to do it in production or on my grade.

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