> unfamiliar with my resume (nobody at Google knew what was on it
> even though they had a copy at the interview). The whole idea of
> such approaches shows (a) a lack of respect for the individual and
> (b) an arrogant attitude of "you should feel LUCKY that we even
> CONSIDERED talking to you"...Google even have me a t-shirt when they
> rejected me :-). It smells like a hazing ritual for a frat club.
>
>
Wow, I don't know anything about Google's hiring practices, but it sounds
like they'd rather shape and mold the cheapest most gaga-eyed
fresh-out-of-college youths instead of seeking out experienced people with
relevant backgrounds in the projects they'd be working on.  At least with
the ITA challenges (I never interviewed there but I have seen these) it can
be a way of demonstrating actual skills (albeit on a toy problem), more so
than ridiculous on-the-spot puzzles at an interview, but it does seem
insulting to require that of people who have more established credentials.

So I think that, on the whole, the universities have made a bad choice
> not from a language perspective but from a "thinking" perspective. I
> have taken the online SICP course from the authors and it had little to
> do with Lisp and a lot to do with thinking. I don't know how to teach


&


> Some people really do think in Python and find Lisp hard. Language
> wars are based on the misunderstanding that there is a right way to
> think. Programming is thinking. Find your "native language".
>

I agree with the former, but I'm less of a relativist on the latter.  I
mean, some ways of thinking are just more elegant and less muddled than
others.  On one hand, it is true that having a diversity of different
approaches is more likely to yield novel and unexpected solutions to
problems.  But when we can clearly see the same pathologically clumsy
behavior repeated and replicated from generation to generation (the need for
design pattens being a perfect example), the languages that foster clearer
thinking should be favored.

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