Rumble in the Jungle with Joel

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In his latest essay, Joel Spolsky has taken the gloves off for a rant against what he calls "Java Schools"; schools that use Java as the implementation language for various Computer Science courses.

Joel's always been a point of love/hate for me: I love his writing style, his lack of fear in pointing out what's wrong, and how he's been a good model of the loud programmer that pisses people off, but who is, more often than not, right. I've taken a bit of pleasure exposing his venture capital articles to business types around me.

It's a bit different when you're at the end things. I lack a formal computer science degree from even the likes of a "Java School" and he seems to sneer at those of us who weren't part of the brotherhood at Yale or MIT. He didn't even spare Penn, which in it's own right is a pretty good school.

It's been interesting to see the responses come, some which look past the vitriol and point out the truth of what he's saying, as well as others I've enjoyed which involve people as educated and smart as Joel putting many of his comments in their place. My favorite thus far has been one from a UPenn professor delivering a bit of a lashing in Joel's direction.

The real question is what I do with what Joel says, which in essence is that good programmers understand recursion, algorithms, and pointers extremely well, and that the best languages to cultivate that understanding are C++ and LISP.

On the first point I agree. I use recursion on a regular basis (lots of XML and heirarchies with my work), but instead of pointers I've been the user of references since I've been using C# and Java. Although I've implemented lots of my own data structures and applied a few well known algorithms, they've been within the safety (and usefullness) of my non-C++ language pool (C#/Java/Javascript/Visual Basic/SQL/Perl etc... ). Maybe there is some reason for me to revisit some of these concepts in the "harder" language of C++ with the use of pointers. And perhaps it's time for me to pick up that dusty copy of LISP, by Patrick Henry Winston, with a compiler and a notebook. I'll never be able to claim that I went to MIT, or Yale, or even a Java School. But I'll be a better programmer for it.

However, there's another thing that all the good programmers I know of seem to understand well and that is regular expressions. And, another thing that intuition tells me is that to learn them well I need a language in which using a regular expression is as easy as a breath of air.

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