How difficult is it to turn a “Java School” programmer into a C or C++ programmer? [closed]

Answer 1

Depends on programmer IQ. The real question is : Is this programmer smart enough for us to invest the learning time? The smarter, the less time he needs to learn.

Answer 2

I don't buy the "You either get pointers/recursion or you don't." The mind is a clean slate. Anyone can learn anything given enough time and interest. The question is - are these kids interested.

We've been looking for an intern at my work, and I've gone through like 30+ resumes from this year's crop. The main thing that shocks me is how few of them have done a god damn thing that wasn't required from them by one of their classes or a job. Find someone who has done something on their own and enjoyed it, and you will be satisfied.

That said, personally I wouldn't waste the time with someone who didn't understand C and assembly. There is a big difference between debugging a core dump with gdb from a C++ crash, and looking at a Java stack trace. C++ is really a horrible language for many reasons, but that which is good about it is that which it has in common with C. It is a powerful way to tell the computer to do exactly what you want it do, without generally having to worry about what other nonsense is being done by some runtime.

Also if you want to save time, don't bother with anyone not from the top 10 engineer schools. Not to say that there aren't great students from tier 2 schools, but from a practical perspective you don't need your hire to be one of them.

MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Illinois Urbana Champaigne, CMU, Caltech, USC, Michigan Ann Arbor, U. Texas Austin.

I also wouldn't hire anyone to write software who uses Microsoft Windows. As a computer science student, you simply couldn't be that interested in software or how computers work without becoming a Linux user (even better if you go with FreeBSD or something else)

Answer 3

My post here is almost answer to your question. Like Joel sad in the link your provided it's really bad that today they don't learn the basic in the school. But the good ones still learn, they take classes in Operating Systems and hack the linux kernel scheduler, they do projects in assembly etc ...
Most of hire in my company are just graduated, and it's impossible to pass our exams without understanding the basic, so cheer up there is still good candidates around you need to know how to find them.

Answer 4

"You can't teach tall." -- some famous basketball coach.

When hiring, you're looking for someone who can both quickly learn new concepts and quickly unlearn habits. It's the latter that can sneak up on you. In the case of a Java->C++ transition, you may face "unlearning" such things as heavy IDE reliance, 'everything is an object,' a mental model of objects and programs that's too high-level, etc.

I would suggest that you look for things that suggest flexibility -- have them write a little program in both an IDE and a plain-text editor, show them a simple C++ function that passes a pointer and modifies the underlying value and see if they stumble, etc.

Answer 5

Well, if they don't understand data structures and algorithmic complexity, they aren't going to be much good at serious Java programming, so I don't see that the language is an issue here.

They won't understand pointers, but good C++ programming typically doesn't use pointers in complicated ways. (There are exceptions, but since I don't know what your company does I can't tell whether they'd apply.) After all, you probably don't want your developers writing their own linked lists rather than using std::list.

They won't understand manual memory management, but that's a lot easier in C++ than it used to be. In modern C++, doing your own memory management has become harder, due to the potential of exceptions, so you want to practice RAII with pretty much everything (using auto_ptr, boost::shared_ptr, whatever).

If I were running things, I'd hire them if they looked good. I'd be aware that there might be problems (C++ is a more demanding language than Java, after all), and have some sort of idea how to deal with them.

There's no reason to avoid hiring people out of college just because they don't have the exact skills you want. The smart ones will learn, and you probably don't want to hire the ones who aren't smart.

Answer 6

A good computer science program should teach the students about the fundamentals, which are the same no matter which programming language you use. The things you mentioned, memory management, data structures, etc. are all part of these fundamental skills. In my experience, a programmer familiar with these concepts will engineer more better (more efficient, faster, easier) solutions than those that do not understand these concepts, especially for non-standard problems.

As for language choice, a good programmer should be able to pick up a new programming language in a matter of weeks, and become proficient in 1-2 months. This is especially true for C++ and Java, which have so many shared features.