Help! Unemployed

Richard A. O'Keefe ok at atlas.otago.ac.nz
Mon Aug 13 23:15:24 UTC 2001


Galchin Vasili <vngalchin at yahoo.com> wrote:
    [Given that the authors of a certain book about the C++ STL
     have demonstrated that they were not yet at the time they
     wrote it competent to write about Smalltalk,]

	But how about to write in Smalltalk?? Surely they
	should be able to become competent Smalltalk quickly
	even if they are not now!
	
This is a good question because it takes us right back to the original
point of the thread, which was hiring.

Skill at C++ is evidence that someone is able to learn about object-
oriented programming.  I expect those authors _would_ be able to learn
Smalltalk fairly quickly, and if *I* were hiring for a Smalltalk job and
they applied, I would certainly take their expertise in C++ as evidence
that they might be good for the job.  I mean, it's not as if Smalltalk
were a complicated language.

The relevance of whether someone can spell "Smalltalk" in their resum\'e
is this:  if they claim to be skilled in some programming language, but
spell its name wrong, they are lying.  Whatever skills they might have
or be able to pick up, they are lying.  That's relevant to hiring.

If someone says in a resum\'e that they studied "SmallTalk" in a
comparative programming languages paper, I am quite ready to believe
them.  That's not a claim to be skilled in the language (yet).

However, I would note that perhaps the most interesting thing about
the Standard Template Library in C++ is that it is a TEMPLATE library,
not an O-O design.  It makes little or no use of inheritance, uses
function objects rather than closures, and relies heavily on the
compiler being able to optimise template expansions.  A thorough
understanding of the STL therefore implies very little about comprehension
of O-O concepts, so people skilled in using the STL might well need quite
a bit of instruction in O-O concepts before becoming good Smalltalk
programmers.  (This is not a claim about those specific individuals.)

P.S. "Troll" refers to fishing.




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