Hugh Aguilar <hughaguila...@yahoo.com> writes: > This is also the attitude that I find among college graduates. They > just believe what their professors told them in college, and there is > no why.
Which college is that? It doesn't agree with my experiences. In CS quite a lot has to be proven with a formal proof, exactly the opposite from what you claim. And after some time students want to see the proof and certainly don't accept "there is no why!" unless it's a trivial thing. Maybe it's because your anecdote is an interpretation from a distance, not based on the actual experience? > This is essentially the argument being made above --- that C > is taught in college and Forth is not, therefore C is good and Forth > is bad --- THERE IS NO WHY! At an university which languages you see depend a lot on what your teachers use themselves. A language is just a verhicle to get you from a to b. What a good study should teach you is how to drive the verhicle without accidents and not that a red one is the best. From top of my head I've seen 20+ languages during my study at the University of Utrecht. Forth wasn't one of them, but I already knew about Forth before I went to the UU. On top of that I had written an extremely minimalistic Forth in Z80 assembly years before I went to the UU (based on the work of someone else). > People who promote "idiomatic" programming are essentially trying to > be Yoda. They want to criticize people even when those people's > programs work. "Works" doesn't mean that a program is good or what. There is a lot to say about a program that works, even one that works flawless. I do it all the time about my own programs. It's good to be critical about your own work. And if you're a teacher, it's good to provide positive feedback. > They are just faking up their own expertise --- Like you, you mean? You consider yourself quite the expert on how people educate and what they learn when educated in a formal environment. Without (if I recall correctly) only second hand information and guessing. > many of them have never actually written a program that works > themselves. Quite some part of CS can be done without writing a single line of code. > The reason why I like programming is because there is an inherent anti- > bullshit mechanism in programming. Your program either works or it > doesn't. Now can you provide a formal proof that it works, or do you just consider running the program a few times sufficient proof that "it works"? > If your program doesn't work, then it doesn't matter if it is > idiomatic, if you have a college degree, etc., etc.. That is the way I > see it, anyway. Well, you see it wrong. A program that doesn't work and is idiomatic is easier to make work and to verify by others that it works. A program that's the result of trial-and-error (that's what quite some people end up doing who are self-taught) is a pain in the ass (pardon my French) to maintain or to extend. > This perspective doesn't hold for much on > comp.lang.forth where we have people endlessly spouting blather > *about* programming, and you are different how? Also note that your post is crossposted to several other groups. > without actually doing any programming themselves. This is why I don't > take c.l.f. very seriously; people attack me all of the time and I > don't really care heh, hence all the replies you write, and mentioning it in this post. -- John Bokma j3b Blog: http://johnbokma.com/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/j.j.j.bokma Freelance Perl & Python Development: http://castleamber.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
