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Comment by 0xDEEPFAC | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, people have contempt for programming in native APIs like gasp Win32. I doubt universities are even producing people capable of programming proficiently in anything except Java and Javascript - which would explain why the desktop has turned into a hellscape of Electron "apps"...

https://medium.com/commitlog/electron-is-cancer-b066108e6c32

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There certainly are universities out there with proper CS courses teaching way more than Java and JS so your point is a bit moot. But that doesn't take away that I also have the impression that universities alone do not produce people capable of programming proficiently in anything at all especially not when it comes to programming complete programs of anything more than very small scale. They simply can't because that takes experience in writing actual software. Whether people get that before they even were in uni of after doesn't really matter it seems.

All anecdotal, but I've seen a bit too much people with CS degrees who were clever enough, had all the knowledge, could produce smart algorithms and everything you want. But the code would just work and that's that. Like: build process only works on their machine, git history like written by a child or non-existent, code impossible to integrate in other projects, trainwreck-like, violating anything you can think of and so on. Is that bad? Well, yeah, but it's also pretty normal and it's not always problematic: teach them some more in an actual team and the really good ones will be better than you in no time.

University is not coding school, either. Students have to learn about a large set of topics and precludes large projects for the most part. Some universities counter that by adding mandatory labs that have students work in teams over longer time scales. But even that is just enough to give them the bare basics of proper work experience. They will have to get that elsewhere.

Also, writing code that barely works and barely gets its job done is a skill ;). Ideally, it means that the person knows how to get something done with minimal effort when that is all that is needed. I noticed that I started to lose that when the projects I worked on became larger and had to meet higher demands. I tend to do stuipd things like one off scripts "properly" when simple hacks would get me there faster.

Computer science != application development. There's a bit of overlap there but they're different worlds. Most universities are teaching theories and fundamentals, not platform APIs.

I don't think universities should teach OS specific APIs in CS or SE curriculums. The student should learn those by himself if he wants to. The university should only explain the concepts.

If I use free software, I will probably prefer to interact with the X11 API or GTK. If I want to develop commercial software I probably want to learn Windows APIs, etc. Forcing everyone into a specific OS is not a good way to teach IMO.

I would gladly write Win32 apps if companies would request and pay as good as JS.

I wonder how much of it is simply down to Win32 being a horrible API to work with? It's so verbose and has nothing in the way of layout helpers, would people be less scared if it were more like Gtk or Qt?

which would explain why the desktop has turned into a hellscape of Electron "apps"...

The low (initial) cost of them already explains it too well.

Universities shouldn't teach any language at all. Maybe show them and explain why each one is better in any example, but I wouldn't like an University that teaches to code for Win32 over Java either.

* My experience in University: I had to code in Assembly language, C, C++ (to learn about memory allocation, pointers, garbage collection - f*ck valgrind - ), Smalltalk / Pharo (for real object-oriented), Python / MatLab (for math things), and Java (for algorithms).

edit: Add Smalltalk/Pharo

University courses must require students to actually write code as part of their assignments. I've worked at universities where the program structure allowed students to finish with little to no coding skills and the the lower tier students from that program were abysmally bad.

A university CS program should force the students to deal with many languages and - importantly - their concepts. A single implementation language for all courses is certainly too little. Show them what it means to dereference a pointer in C, how to write a loop and a function call in assembler, what smalltalk objects can do by passing messages instad of calling methods etc. But I think that having a main language in a CS program is a good idea becaue it allows the teachers to pose more interesting implementation excercises if the students don't have to spend time to learn yet another language while trying to solve a problem.

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