🚀 go-pugleaf

Joe Kraska (jkraska@bbn.com) wrote:
>
>I agree with this setiment whole-heartedly! I recently interviewed a
>graduating cs major, who claimed to be 'very good' with C programming.
>This naturally led me to probe into his knowledge of dynamic memory
>allocation, because mastery of dynamic memory is what seperates good
>programmers from bad ones in C.
>
>My first question was 'show me how to allocate an array of pointers to
>strings'. His response was, 'huh?'. After asking a few more questions
>it turned out he understood dynamic memory not at all. Amazing to me
>how you could get through a CS program in todays world without learning
>linked lists, hash tables, b trees, ad nauseum. But so it was.
>
>There are, of course, many working professionals out there who use C
>but really don't understand dynamic memory. Maybe JAVA is for them. The
>dumb-down language of the 90's.

 I don't get your point.
I am certainly not a very good C programmer (well, passable but I am mostly
Assembly-ist and Forth-ist) but I cannot imagine how someone cannot
learn how to use pointers or dynamic allocation.
Are there really such people around who call themselves programmers?
[I always thought that languages that hide these details [like how to
allocate such and such on dynamic storage] were designed to be used
by non-programmers (eg. someone wants to write something simple
at home, does not want to spend countless number of hours on it
so learns something like BASIC where you don't have to worry about
how your strings are stored).
On the other hand when CS programs begin with teaching LISP at the first
year what do you expect ????????????

Andras