🚀 go-pugleaf

   From: h9290246@hkuxa.hku.hk (Zsoter Andras)
   Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 16:43:27 GMT

   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.

You seem to get his point, and what's more you seem to agree with it.

   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 ????????????

*I* expect them to learn the important things about programming (data
structures, algorithms, abstraction, encapsulation, design, etc)
rather than the things that would be better done by a machine, like
memory management.