Don't forget the classic "lets try to make him feel better about being rejected" line:

Considerably simpler. It's harder to get simpler than Scheme. But I'm not recommending the course because of Scheme, but because of its content. Scheme just gets out of the way, allowing you to concentrate on concepts.

That said, even though Scheme isn't really used in industry, so it won't help you get a job directly, it has a bunch of advantages:

1. Will give you experience with functional programming.
2. Is very similar to Closure, if you ever decide to go that direction.
3. For a lot of good programmers, I think knowing Scheme and SICP is a signal that you are a serious good programmer.

Those are all ancillary benefits, though. My recommendation really has nothing to do with Scheme itself, and in fact a lot of people don't like Scheme because of all the parentheses, but that's a purely cosmetic thing.

That's a good point. When I was an undergrad, we were taught assembly and microcode, computer architecture and OS theory in combination with data structures etc. in Pascal before they let us loose on C. That way we had some lower level knowledge + a little programming discipline as a foundation.

That's what I believe is the right way. Learn either x86 or ARM assembly first. Everything makes so much more sense afterwards.

I couldn't help myself and would probably answer with a mail along the lines of...

Dear person,

550

Kind regards,
me

scheme's syntax is much smaller than python's (and almost any other well known language).

but I don't think that necessarily makes it easier to use or to learn with.

starting out, a lot of things will seem counterintuitive.

for example, scheme uses prefix notation, so you type (+ 1 1) to add one and one instead of (1 + 1). scheme also has some important mnemonics that don't make immediate sense: car, cdr, cons, let.

at the risk of sounding cliché, good python reads like English. on the other hand, because python has so many things (data structures, functions, etc.) built in, its not the best language for learning about how those things actually work.

as for SICP, I am liking it so far, but one thing that bugs me is they define almost everything recursively, even when it is an iterative process. this often makes it harder (at least for me) to see what the code actually does.

i don't disagree with your points, necessarily, but i think it's all cosmetic stuff. it's stuff that will throw you for 5 minutes at most. my point is that scheme gets out of your way because it's so easy to learn, not that scheme is the world's most beautiful language.

i think doing iterative processes recursively with an accumulator is just a POV change you make, and then you can switch back and forth between that and traditional loop or whatever else without much thought. so yes, i can see how that would be annoying if you're used to the other way (sort of like it's hard to get used to putting indirect and direct objects before the verb in spanish) but at the end of the day they are logically equivalent (it's essentially just a config variable setting)

econophile, they aren't defining everything recursively. Yes, they are self-calling functions, but that isn't recursion.

in Python, you are writing:

In Scheme, you are turning the for loop into a function. The lesson is that, even in Python, the for loop is self-calling even thought that information is abstracted from you. This is not recursion.

When you get to chapter 5, all of this will make much more sense to you. They know they use recursion, or rather what looks like recursion, a lot, but they explain exactly how it is all going down much more than I'll go into here.

I think I have enough rejection letters that I can start to write and NLP to analyze common themes and threads. Add a bit of semantic / emotional sugar and I have an SAAS for creating the perfect rejection letters.

Common themes:

If the letter begins with "Thank you for..." it is a rejection letter. I think this is base 0.

A section about how difficult of a decision it is to reject your application. Some go into how much time they spent on the application, discussing it with the teammates, etc. No, this didn't happen, but thanks for lying to make me feel better.

"We have other positions open, please see our openings here: [link to job listings]." Uh... if you legit think I'm a better fit for another position, why don't you forward my resume?

"Please join us on LinkedIn." I find this line the most insulting, to be honest.

"We are not able to offer any feedback at this time." Wait, you just claimed that you spent hours looking at my resume...

not really in love with SICP either tbph. I was really enthusiastic and read the first 2 chapters in like a week. It took me a year to pick away at chapter 3 and I felt like I learned nothing. I finally made it to the eval/apply stuff in chapter 4 only to learn it didn't actually involve magic. I never read chapter 5.

Loved the SICP lectures I watched on youtube though.

One of my most recent ones:

Started putting a GUI on my project.

http://192.241.194.172:8080/

Any feedback appreciated**. The most "complete" parts are under Channels > Amazon > [etc] > New Item. I haven't put any form submissions in this yet. I still have a lot of stuff that hasn't been plugged into this yet, but getting there.

** Yes, I know it looks like trash, but for me, it is like e-Da Vinci.

so...applying for internships and every company i applied for have some kind of question along the lines of: "what excites u about working for xxx(company name)?"

i don't even know what i can say except, its a big company with a position in a field that i am interested in?

Anything excite you in your school work? Could possibly work that in.

well, if the subject material is interesting, yes

This is an excellent post and it should/could go off in a few different topics of discussion. Regarding the bolded, there are a lot of skills that in software development that are hard to acquire. Being open minded regarding alternatives is something that I would state is not all that common in all walks of life let alone software development. If the point is that being exposed to a lot a more concepts in software development will help in becoming more open minded, sure I agree. I will reiterate though that software development concepts tend to be hard to learn.

So try to tie that in with what the company wants you to do. Even talk about the intetesting subjects you studied in school and hoping to apply the valuable knowledge you gained from those subjects to the software development positions they have.

Hey Dave,

What kind of feedback were you looking for? Specifically on the GUI design aspects? Or more on the interaction design (ie, how it's organized, is it intuitive, etc)? Or something else?

Also, can you describe the type (or types) of users who will be using it?

Thanks. And you're right, the phenomenon is not limited to software development.

The point was to get that exposure early, before the biases toward your own hard-earned skill sets kick in. As an example, I got into this long discussion with a guy on code review. He was a bright, self-taught guy who primary language was C#. He was able to solve fairly difficult problems in a classic, but verbose, procedural style. He'd been a professional developer for some years. I showed him how to rewrite one of his 50-line monstrosities in about 7 lines of not even very dense functional js code (which he knew a bit of).

Now, when most beginners see something like that, their reaction is want to learn more about it, because it seems so obviously better. This guy's reaction was to fight it, and to start looking for reasons to dismiss it. He questioned whether it was as extensible as his version. He asked, "But if what if you had to change X?" I showed him it was a 1 line change to handle X. Still, he was distrustful, and made some hand-wavy arguments about why he felt his 50-line version was still clearer to him.

So here's a smart, capable guy, who probably could have learned this new way of doing things with a couple hours of work, but forget it. Because of his background and his biases, he's ruined, maybe for life.

That's the kind of thing I'm warning against.

I think the most important thing to consider on this topic is that as soon as you start to bring (biased thinking, stubbornness, religiosity) into (thought/action/your life) you have just given yourself a competitive disadvantage.

By simply being more open to the idea of doing things better, anyone has an edge on you.

That is very bad.

People like the person you describe are generally to be avoided, obviously you can't always avoid them, but those are the exact type of people who embody why it is so hard to hire good people in general.

Agree with all this.

Total sidenote recommendation for those of you doing webdev on teams, where you share versions, get feedback, and iterate: https://usersnap.com/ -- You just add a little js widget to your pages on your dev box, and people giving you feedback can just click and start drawing or commenting directly on a screenshot of the page inside the browser, which then gets send to you. Really convenient. Free for a small number of project I think -- I haven't had to pay yet.

I would immediately cut contact with any developer who fights against reducing a 50 line function to a 7 line one. Not worth it all to continue discussion. I love that **** and am always looking for ways to make my crap better. **** I'd probably pay for code review for personal projects.

I feel like we're being a little hard on this guy and what gaming_mouse described is largely just human nature. He took a little farther than most would, but we all have egos and we're all proud of the code we write (except during crunch time, **** that code) and it's not the easiest thing to be like "you're right, I could have done this better".

I def don't agree with him, just think that it seems heavy-handed to be like "yeah **** this guy, waste of a hire" when everyone is on that spectrum to a certain degree. I haven't met many ego-free programmers. Grue may be an exception from his above post.

Ive been working on a project with a friend and def discovered I am way more stubborn than I initially thought. Trying to work on flexibility and openness now that Ive identified it as an issue. Cutting contact seems a little extreme, self awareness takes work and practice so at least give the guy a chance to work on it.