Re: Y Store now C++

[Trevis Rothwell <address@hidden>]

I once read that while the number of students majoring in computer
science has increased dramatically (compared to, say, 1980?), the
number of students who are actually good at it has stayed about
the same.

Could this be the source of many of the "average" programmers?
Students who aren't really interested in CS major in it anyway
(perhaps with financial aspirations, or just because it sounds
neat, or whatever), and then go out and get jobs doing something
they aren't really interested in?

Maybe it's easy to be needlessly hard on the "average" programmers.
They don't necessarily have the intense interest in programming
that the people on this list have.  It's just a job for them.
We wouldn't expect fry cooks at Hardee's to put serious thought
into the tools and procedures they use; most of them just do
exactly as they are told.  Cooking fries is just a job; their
intense interests are elsewhere.

I'm only guessing, but that might explain the present state of
things, at least in part.  But since Lisp *is* being taught in
schools more, it sounds reasonable that its future could be
bright...  :-)

 -- Trevis Rothwell


Michael Vanier wrote:
> 
> Well, *lots* of universities teach scheme in their first CS course.  I
> consider that "lisp experience".  This is part of the grass-roots effort
> that is (IMO) the only way to get real acceptance of advanced languages.
> Five years from now, when people who took scheme in CS 1 have graduated and
> are working in industry, some of them will stumble across problems in java
> or C++ and say to themselves "this was so easy in scheme; we'd just use a
> closure".  Then they'll start playing around with languages that support
> closures in their free time, maybe choosing one of them as a scripting
> language to use with their work, and suddenly industry is using more
> advanced languages.  Of course, the key to the success of this is to not
> tell your boss what you're doing ;-)
> 
> Mike