07 April, 2006

Academic Programmers

A few days ago, I completed a piece of CS coursework. The task was to write a PROLOG program to perform some simple iterative calculations. The hardest question was to explain how the task would have been more difficult in ML, and even more difficult in an imperative language. This was a difficult question to answer, because it was in fact easier in ML, and even easier in Pascal.

The current edition of Visual Systems Journal has an article on how to solve Sudoku puzzles in T-SQL.

This has led me to the conclusion that an academic programmer is someone who would consider the investigation of how to fry an egg with a screwdriver to be a worthy pursuit.