Are pointers and recursion the Latin and Greek of Computer Science?
” Joel Spolsky has an insightful article on his “Joel on software” blog about computer science curriculums and recent changes. He equates teaching of concepts like pointers and recursion to the teaching of Latin and Greek in the early 1900’s. These things aren’t taught because they have great practical purpose outside of school. They are taught because they train the mind to think about hard things. They are also taught because they help to weed out the students that aren’t going to make it later on. In Scouting, I’ve had an opportunity to counsel quite a few people that were starting to look at colleges and wanted advice on a career in programming. My advice has always been that the best schools are those that care more about teaching theory than teaching languages. Languages change. When I went to school, c++ was all the rage. Now, its Java. Who knows what it will be in 10 years? If all you know is Java, you’re useless when Java goes away (just as programmers that only know Fortran a
