But Joel isn’t really arguing anything. His essay is whining about the good ol’ days—he actually ends with “Feh”—and making some poorly founded assertions about what computer science is and precisely how smart you should be before you’re allowed to graduate. Though he has many good ones, I’d be careful about putting much faith in that particular essay. I’m not convinced, at least.

Really, what Joel wants is for all his applicants to be smart, especially smart in a way he can interpret. He’s getting old, after all.

I’d argue that the way we’re fragmenting CS at UCI is the right way to go. There needs to be a degree, I think, that gives you what you need to know to scribble hyper-optimized Bayesian magic in the Linux kernel with your left hand. Maybe that should be your degree. But there is also value is not teaching students C, and instead expecting them to learn things like the various design disciplines. The latter can make Twitter, and the former can make sure Twitter’s infrastructure can handle the load. (Ahem.)

Besides, in Informatics, UCI starts with Scheme (recursion-only) and some assembly. We do the Java in CS-2. All is not lost.

I wasn’t making fun of C. That is just a factor of using a low level language.

Well sorry for going on about Cal, but it is a great CS school.

First off, every time I read about Joel’s gospels, I wonder… who is this guy? The CEO of a small company. Have you heard of their software? Have you heard of anyone using it? Have you seen it? Their one product seems far to simple to require intense knowledge of pointers – in fact the only real programming hurdle they claim to have jumped is building a VBScript to PHP compiler. Repeat that: a VBScript to PHP compiler. Huh? A bad to worse compiler.

Next: God did not invent the C language. There’s an odd idea that C is the natural language of computers, and that’s entirely incorrect. The speed that C affords and its specific implementation of pointers was the work of a few developers thirty or forty years ago.

Next: “Learning C is something that you generally need to be forced into.”

I’m a college student, at a 1/4 java school, and let me say this: almost all college courses provide an unnatural and ineffective system of learning CS. If you think that you will learn CS via courses primarily, that’s a bummer.

But in the meantime, I went out and bought an AVR butterfly microprocessor from mouser.com for $20.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_Butterfly

Then I went and bought John Morton’s book on programming AVRs in assembly language. Short, easy and fun. FUN.

http://www.amazon.com/AVR-Introductory-Course-John-Morton/dp/0750656352/

Next, I will work through a C book on AVR:

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Microcontrollers-Featuring-Butterfly-Compiler/dp/0976682206/

And finally to tie it all together, I am becoming one with this website:

http://www.avrfreaks.net

Learning AVRs and assembler and C on those devices has been one of the most educational and fun things I have ever done. It just added life to my programming (I’ve been coding for 11 years).

But don’t take my advice…. JUST LEARN JAVA ONLY so that at the next software contract I go for I can wipe you off the map. :o)

have a nice day, Nick

Perhaps a more significant problem is that you’re going to UC-Irvine. Perhaps you should think of transferring to a more widely regarded school.

Perhaps just as important as programmming, he has done a fantastic job writing about programming. Which is something we all enjoy reading about. It’s the same reason Joel Spolsky is widely recognized in the industry.

In the end, Yegge is far greater programmer than most of us can ever hope to be, thus we are not in a position to say that he should not be included in that list.