On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Tony Duell wrote:
> Another thing that annoys me (sort-of related to the above) is the
> common, and IMHO silly job interview question 'Do you know C?' (or some
> other programming language).
>
> If I wanted a programmer, I'd much rather have somebody who didn't know
> the particular language I was going to use, but who did understand things
> like data structures, recursion, stacks, pointers, analysis of
> algorithms, stability of algorithms, etc. Because I know that sort of
> person could learn just about any language in under a week given the
> standards documents. Whereas the person who'd been on a C course (and
> thus 'knows C') may well be able to write trivial programs in that
> language, but will probably not be able to write large programs well (if
> at all).
>
> Still, what do I know? I'm not, and never have been, a programmer.
>
> -tony
I'd suggest that a person who understands CS basics, as you outline, is
better than one who hacks away "until something works".
But there are some programming languages (C++ leaps to mind) that do take
quite a while to master the nuances.
----
>From what I see in the programming field, more and more programmers are
needed that use high level languages (VB, Perl, Python, JavaScript,
Java, etc.) than traditional languages like C and Fortran. We do not need
efficiencies that C or Fortran give us, in most cases.
-Mike
Received on Mon Jun 19 2000 - 23:50:48 BST