Marshmallow's Wisdom

• Selling a 1080p television to an elderly person wearing bifocals is like selling uggs to a war veteran with no legs
• “Compliance compensates for times when normal market forces fail to provide adequate alignment of interests. For example, when organizations in a position to protect data aren’t responsible for the losses.” – Courtesy of Jeremiah Grossman
• Java is the current latin of programming languages
• Preparing code to change is a lot harder than making the first change without thinking about it
• When building onto a bad system, trying to do things right only makes everything more complicated
• The Unix terminal tab auto-complete feature is the best auto-complete implementation in existence. More systems need to mimic its functionality.
• Programming languages should never use single characters (e.g. $, @, %) to signify data types or other information about variables.
• Programming in pajamas or sweats is 100x more productive than programming in business attire.
• Some people draw ugly pictures because they cannot envision beautiful pictures.
• Some people write ugly programs because they cannot envision beautiful programs.

Regarding the 3rd to last… please tell me you’re going to try and implement attire changes at Principal…

“Java is the current latin of programming languages”

Does anyone really think we should teach Java because it is a great exemplar? Or because its grammar will teach us everything we need in order to learn all other languages well?

If I were to pick one, I’d say Lisp or Scheme. Most people think it’s “dead”. Many people think it is somehow “what everybody should know”, even when few of those people claim we should use it in our work. The main problem is, it has such a sparse grammar that learning it doesn’t prepare people to learn other languages’ grammars (even if it “teaches us how to think”.

I dislike Java, don’t get me wrong, but Perl is worse.

@Wallingford: I think to really understand programming and programming languages, we should teach multiple languages with a focus on their various features rather than the language itself. Students need to be taught things like Object-Oriented Design, Functional Programming, Procedural Programming, et cetera. The languages they are taught is irrelevant regardless if they are Java, C++, Ruby, PHP, et cetera.

We don’t teach English to students every year and expect them to be a linguistics expert. We even go so far as to expect people to be exposed to a foreign language in high school. I am pretty sure a linguistics major is expected to be taught more than a single natural language. Why should computer science majors be any different when it comes to programming languages?

“Java is the current latin of programming languages” Amen–love the clarification in the above comment as well