[ILUG] Computer science education

[Justin Mason]

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Jeremy Smyth writes:
>In the Real World(tm) of programming (which I agree is not necessarily a
>priority for CS education at university), assembly language experience is
>about as useful as a wet biscuit. Java (and/or VB, Perl, etc.), by allowing
>the coder to be "lazy" at some things, saves their brain cycles for more
>interesting things like high level architecture - a difficult thing to do
>when you're digging around in IP registers and accumulators.

Disagree.

I've seen a load of Java/VB/perl programmers who have no idea what
effects their high-level code has on the low-level stuff; resulting
in

  - needless disk accesses
  - needless network accesses
  - data structures that are extremely cache-unfriendly
  - use of heap instead of stack for performance-critical frequent
    allocation and deallocation (although in those interpreted languages
    this is pretty much unavoidable as far as I know)
  - absolutely no comprehension of why those are bad things

A bit of low-level experience makes these issues clear.

As Kenn said, 'It is the "first principles" that everything derives from.
It is a common language that everyone can revert to.  It is what is
underneath all these nice, friendly layers of abstraction.'

Too right.

- --j.
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