The Perils of JavaSchools (2005)

I've read this article before, and I somewhat agree with it. However, java is a much more practical language to program in than c unless you're doing work where c is absolutely necessary. Programming speed is usually preferable.<p>What I don't agree with is pointers and recursion making people's heads explode. Pointers are just another language construct and with enough practice anyone will get used to them. Recursion is a mathematical concept. Thus, for all its elegance and simplicity, people still find it difficult in the same way they find mathematics difficult.<p>The real weeder classes that I've seen are generally theory and discrete math classes. The truly challenging systems and programming related classes usually aren't offered until the latter years of a student's CS career (such as OS, Distributed Systems, etc).<p>Disclaimer: My experiences come only with my university - Carnegie Mellon, and chatting with friends from others

"Instead what I'd like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers."<p>I'd like to clarify that doing a bunch of pointer arithmetic and manual memory management does not necessarily make someone a great programmer. In many cases, it distinguishes them as a "midgrade and needs to learn something about premature optimization" programmer.<p>Great programmers write solutions that make hard problems look easy, and mediocre programmers write solutions that make medium problems look very hard. Java makes it easy to do either of those -- anyone who's reviewed a decent quantity of Java code can attest to this (compare the code style in, say, Guava or Lucene with your typical J2EE app).

What is sad that all the cool hardcore C programming jobs are going oversees - unless you're a computer engineer and deal with hardware. Everyone is looking for php, ajax, python, etc, basically C-based type-less languages which anyone competent in C can pick up in a matter of days. But try to apply to those companies with C, C++ and x86 assembler on your resume, no one will get back to you.

I still remember this about-face, makes me chuckle every time: "Now, don't get me wrong: there's nothing wrong with Java as an implementation language.<p>Wait a minute, I want to modify that statement. I'm not claiming, in this particular article, that there's anything wrong with Java as an implementation language. There are lots of things wrong with it but those will have to wait for a different article."

Java has pointers. What it doesn't have is pointers overloaded as arrays and iterators, pointers to stack objects, pointers to pointers, or pointers with undefined values.<p>Point being, there's nothing wrong with pointers but there may be something wrong with the way memory is used in C.