🚀 go-pugleaf

[Richard Botting]

|   Some one pointed out:
|   > As a student you learn: comparative study of programming languages
|   > In the real world they want: 5+ years with C++ only
|   Have you ever tried learning 5+ years of experience in
|   4 years?
|   
|   Hey ho... its that arithmetic word problem thing again:-)

it may actually be that the surreal world has problems counting.  when the
WWW had just celebrated its first anniversary outside of CERN, some company
was looking for people with 3+ years of experience with WWW, and they were
not looking for Tim Berners-Lee, but some doofus to write HTML.

5+ years of experience with C++ means you have 4+ years of experience in a
language that no longer exists, but looks suspiciously like C++ of today.
knowing how extremely hard it is to remember the final text of a standard
one has been working on for several years, I would not recommend employing
anyone who claimed that much "experience" without showing me that he's up
on the latest, all-important changes to the language, knew where to find it
implemented, and also knew the stability of various features along the
time-line.  however, tracking such large standards as C++ required nearly a
full-time job, so I sincerely doubt that anyone with 5+ years of full-time
programming experience in C++ is any good, anymore.  it would be compiler-
and version-specific experience, _not_ experience in C++, the language.

personally, I think a CS grad should be able to pick up a language standard
and be able to assess (1) whether or not it is sufficiently well written to
learn the language from, and (2) how long time it would take to learn the
language from it.  CS grads should _not_ need to read tutorials on
programming paradigms.  (of course, C++ fails miserably in this regard.)  I
find it reasonable to expect of a good CS grad that s/he be able to learn a
new language from the standard in three months, _maximum_, but I would also
exempt C++ from that, since it's such a horrible language and specification.

on the other hand, the sheer number of C++ programmers wanted is not a good
sign.  if the industry hires that many people, and we have no noticeable
change in the backlog of software development, something is seriously amiss.

the biggest problem with the soi disant "real world" is that it thinks _it_
is the real world.  it's like the alcoholic who doesn't think he has a
drinking problem.  the "real world" is generally clueless.

#<Erik 3017129024>
-- 
#<Xyzzy 202B370B73>