Re: [tlug] Fortran --> Python (was linux engineer)

[Jim Breen <jimbreen@example.com>]

On 7 June 2012 15:46, Attila Kinali <attila@example.com> wrote:

> And how many PhD students do you know, who actually have programming
> skills?

I share a lab with about 20 of them. Most of them are scarily
good programmers.

> My experience tells me, that even those who write code on a daily basis,
> heck, even those whos PhD is based on writing code, are very poor programmers.

That's not my experience at all. In this country you can't get a
"PhD is based on writing code", but the people I am talking about
are CS graduates in the top few percent. As it's a computational
linguistics lab there's quite a lot of programming involved. These
days it's mostly C/C++/Python/Perl.

> They tend to learn only enough to be able to modify the code that someone
> else (most probably their predecessor) has written, with very little
> understanding of what is actually going on.

Again, not round here.

> And usually it's in vain to tell them, that if they'd sit down for a week
> and actually learn the language they are using, they'd be at least twice
> as productive. They just tell you that they are not computer scientists
> and thus dont need to know that much detail about "computers".

Ah. I guess we're talking about apples and oranges. Where I am they wouldn't
be in the PhD program if they weren't computer scientists...

Jim

--
Jim Breen
Adjunct Snr Research Fellow, Clayton School of IT, Monash University
Webmaster: Hawthorn Rowing Club, Treasurer: Japanese Studies Centre
Graduate student: Language Technology Group, University of Melbourne