Half of my graduating class could barely program.

Yep. Way more than half of the people I interview can't even do a very basic FizzBuzz, even with guidance. Those are people with a degree, job experience and reference letters.

What did you study?

Computer Science.

I see. Computer Science is not an engineering degree and it is not about programming. That's what Software Engineering degrees are for.

Most CS programs have software dev in their curricula; I don't think it's wild to expect a CS student to code FizzBuzz.

Yes, but overall it's still a science degree and not an engineering degree.

I graduated in 2006 in CS, and I had at least 5 or 6 software development classes. We also had electives, which included DB design and algorithms. Many of the higher-level classes allowed us to use any language of our choice as well.

I was self-taught since I was 15, so most of these classes were just review for me. I met lots of people that didn't know how to code as seniors (and never ended up getting a job in their field).

Many of the top schools don't have software/computer engineering degrees, rather people who want to be SWEs get CS degrees.

Yes, you're right. And that's a problem.

Well idk what an actual software engineering program would teach that you can't learn better on your own or on the job. Formal CS education teaches things that simultaneously help with the job and also can't be learned there. But some people just don't have grit, whichever path they took.

Software engineers graduates I've met are usually much worse at programming than computer science graduates.

I'm gonna strongly +1 on this.

Most of the "Software Engineering" curricula I've seen is catered towards "getting a job as a programmer", and is mostly focused on languages, frameworks and outdated processes.

As an engineer in another discipline, there's no engineering there.

I would rank like this: Computer Science > Self Taught > Software Engineering.

I might go as far as saying that SE is dogmatic. And the dogma is usually very outdated. Not necessarily useless, though.

That too

A corporation being shady? Imagine that!

Statistically LLMs generate more bugs for the same feature.

Right, but you should be doing analysis and choosing the right tool for the job. 9/10 or probably more Java projects never need to use FFI because of the sheer size of the Java ecosystem. C# has always needed a better FFI story because its ecosystem is an order of magnitude smaller.

Didn’t they start that from acquiring jet.com?

IIRC, they revamped Walmart.com around the time of the Jet.com acquisition, so that probably had something to do with it.

Cool! I had a friend working there at the time. First time I heard about F#

How about we just let people code how they want if the codebase doesn’t care how it gets written? If it doesn’t matter why must we use one particular tool versus another?

Because most code is paid for and the people paying want as much code as possible for as cheap as they can get it.

If your code is expensive, the fact is that now someone can write it cheaper.

That's the real problem, people making decisions that think more code == more software == more value. We've been through this over and over again, managers think they know better, engineers left to clean up their mess

Once union types land, it will just need first class support for checked errors instead of unchecked exceptions flying around everywhere.

You can't even read a file in Kotlin without Java.

Not true today anymore, but definitely true for a lot of its history.

Really? I know there's kotlin.io.* but afaik that doesn't work on KNative or KJS.

thats pretty much what I mean, yes.

Java has first class sum types, pattern matching, and compiler exhaustion on types. It's probably far more expressive than C# currently until they get union types.

Well, C# has more powerful pattern matching, only compiler exhaustiveness on types is missing today. In Java, sum types (sealed interfaces/classes) require all members to have the same parent, so they can be used only in very narrow cases.

As opposed to C# that doesn't have any form of sum types?

C# will have more advanced sum types this year, it's currently in preview.

Their sum types aren't particularly useful since they can never be used to implement union types which I believe c# has plans for following their sum types already in preview. So I guess similarly neck and neck.

Afaik this was fixed a long time ago.