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Все-таки у великих людей голова работает по-другому. Сейчас прочитал интервью с Бьерном Страустрапом. Тема разговора — обучение программированию в высших школах. Сам создатель C++ бросил свою иследовательскую работу в Bell Labs и где там еще, и стал преподовать в Техаском университете.

Удивительно, как такие люди могут открывать хорошо известные вещи с неожиданной стороны. Все мы привылки к тому, что студенты ленивы или глупы. Казалось бы что тут еще добавить? А вот Страустрапу есть что:

The students I saw were neither stupid nor lazy; they were simply systematically pointed in another direction. Next, I looked at the textbooks used for beginning students and found them fairly accurate, but tedious, uninspiring, and dodging important hard issues. They never went beyond the basics – most of the C++ standard library was deemed “advanced” and at best presented towards the very end of a semester course. Worse still, they were insufferably verbose and obsessed with technical details.

Had I been given such books as a 1st year student, I would have changed fields. Those books were trying to spoon feed the students. Good students need to be challenged!

Дальше тема challenge развивается:

High schools could teach students to work hard at something (just about anything), to search out information as needed, and learn to express their ideas in writing and orally. Project-based work is good for that. Exactly which programming language is used for software is less important, but the aim should not be to make tasks as simple as possible but to challenge students.

Ну, и напоследок, ответ на вопрос, что вы посоветуете начинающим программистам:

Learn your first language well. That means trying it for difficult tasks. Don’t obsess about technical details. Focus on techniques and principles.

Learn another programming language; choose any language that’s quite different from what you are best acquainted with. You can’t be a professional in the IT world knowing only one language. No one language is the best for everyone and for everything.

Don’t just do programming. Computing is always computing something. Become acquainted with something that requires your software development skills: Mediaeval history, car engine design, rocket science, medical blood analysis, image processing, computational geometry, biological modeling, whatever seems interesting. Yes, all of these examples are real, from my personal experience.

Если первые два совета были на слуху, то с третьим уже не так. И действительно умные слова, как ни крути.