On Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:01:54 -0500, Mueen Nawaz wrote:

> Now granted, his background is not in CS (some other engineering).

As a side comment, some of the best problem-solving coders I've ever seen 
(not software engineers, mind) are people who come from engineering 
backgrounds.  I participated in several ACM programming contests when I 
was in college, and one of the top ranked teams in the world was the team 
from the University of Central Florida.  Their top team had no Computer 
Science students in it.  What's more, ACM provided a choice of language 
(C or Pascal) for the contests, and the UCF team worked *only* in Pascal.

The guy who was their coach was amazing as well - also only programed in 
Pascal for the contests (don't know what other languages he knew, never 
thought to ask the few times I met him), but he could solve all 7 
problems in the test set very trivially.  His co-coach would select the 
problems so he had no idea what they were.

I guess part of the point is that knowing C isn't the end-all be-all of 
programming. :-)

Jim

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