Recruiting is two problems: outreach and qualification. We did novel things on both fronts. For this thread, I just want to be pointing out: the changes we made to qualification were critical, instrumental, fundamental to our success. Most of our best hires could not have happened had we qualified candidates the way we did in 2009, and the way most firms do today.
It's only sometimes about people not being aware of a language feature. It's usually about people not being able to program.
System.out.println("" + 3/4);
In reality you'd only use a mod operator if you were doing things like sorting into 4 columns or doing an operation on every 3rd thing. And it's not a concept that is introduced at school. Now I try to think of it, I think I only picked up mod when I was learning rounding in my first language and the man page happened to mention modulus at the same time.
And every dev should have hit the remainder operator at bare minimum when they had a long running loop and wanted to print a status every kth operation, eg
for(int i=0; i < 100000000; i++){
// some operation
if(i % 100000 == 0)
printf("** operating on count %d\n", i);
}
z++;
if(z>100000) {
print x;
z=0;
}
A brief search on SO and lo and behold:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1504420/c-what-does-the-p...
Viewed 38,000 times. Every language probably has a similar question.
While only "older" (I'm 39) developers will be likely to have been in that situation, it took another decade after I moved onto hardware with FPU's before I worked on anything where we actually used floating point math.
Instead we'd be working with fixed point stored in integer. E.g. for financial systems, floating point is a nightmare. Working with fixed point to whatever number of decimal points our accounting department wanted (5-6 typically) for tax calculations and the like was preferred.
So there are large number of areas where people can have worked successfully for many years without ever using floating point.