Joel Spolsky's The Perils of JavaSchools really popped my bubble when I first read it. It was part of a suggested reading list from the Software Engineering MA program I was taking (hidden away on a dark corner of a syllabus). Reading it felt like a refutation of almost everything I knew about software at that point. He introduced to me new topics I had never heard about from my compsci classes like Lisp and SICP.
Reading the post, it became clear to me that it was not about how quick or deep you can learn a language, but rather what are all the ideas and abstractions that enable such a language to exist. Computer science really was more than just computers. After reading that post I looked around and discovered the youtube videos of SICP, which have done more for my love and knowledge of programming than the entire MA program I took.
Reading the post, it became clear to me that it was not about how quick or deep you can learn a language, but rather what are all the ideas and abstractions that enable such a language to exist. Computer science really was more than just computers. After reading that post I looked around and discovered the youtube videos of SICP, which have done more for my love and knowledge of programming than the entire MA program I took.
Link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...