Swimming

1st May 2006 | Tags: programming

Out to lunch with the department today, bemoaning the state of Computer Science education. The general consensus is that the local universities seem to be teaching Java in an SWF setting - Structs With Functions. This leads to a seriously flawed notion of what OO programming is, and can seriously warp the still-forming mind of a new coder.

Because I am wont to do so (and have been doing so for that last two weeks or so, much to everyone’s chagrin), I took this a step further. Really, if you’re writing Java then what you have are methods, not functions. Even if you use them like that. So rather than have SWF, you have SWM, or Swim.

This is followed by much entertainment exploring the analogy - things start off easy, but as you do more of it it’s harder to keep afloat, there’s a possibility you might just wash out, etc. Then Jon comes up with the whopper:

“So that’s why they call it the waterfall method of software development”