Joel is right!

A coworker of mine, Anand Iyer (www.Artificialignorance.net), pointed us to a really good article / opinion-piece by Joel Spolsky .  Joel rants on the “Perils of JavaSchools”.

Now, you have to indulge me a bit here.  Yes, I’m an IT Pro.  But my upbringing into my career was with a CompSci degree at the University of Minnesota, where I was trained in Computer Science and Software Design/Engineering using FORTRAN, Pascal, C, and LISP.  Following that I spent many fulfilling years as a Software Engineer, writing in C and C++, and cranking out some (what I thought were) elegant uses of pointers, funky-recursions, etc.  Stuff that, quite frankly, would make YOUR head explode.  <heh>  So I know and can relate full-well to what Joel is talking about.  And while I’d like to disagree with his brief statements about how far Microsoft is behind Google in massively-parallel computing (we’ll save that for another day), I really loved Joel’s take on the state of computer science programs and what/who the schools are churning out.  

It’s well worth the read for any of you that have a similar CompSci background, or are considering going into it.