Not exactly what you might think the title implies, but The Perils of JavaSchools by Joel is an excellent read. All I can say is Amen.

…what I’d like to claim is that Java is not, generally, a hard enough programming language that it can be used to discriminate between great programmers and mediocre programmers. It may be a fine language to work in, but that’s not today’s topic. I would even go so far as to say that the fact that Java is not hard enough is a feature, not a bug, but it does have this one problem.

If I may be so brash, it has been my humble experience that there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion.

The thing that makes me nervous is that there is an ever decreasing number of people (especially coming out of today’s CS programs) that actually “get it”. And by “get it” I mean people that actually understand the inner workings of the systems they build upon. How the languages that make things easy for them actually translate to the ones and zeros that do things.

The attrition of those individuals (people of my generation and earlier) will turn out to be one of the largest problems the computer science field will face over the next 10-20 years.