All they had were 1's and 0's

Joel Spolsky has got to be one of the best writers on programming on the Internet. I would rank him up there with Steve McConnell.

He goes on a rant today on how Java is being used to dumb down the computer science degree. There's some really good stuff in this article, like griping about recruiters who use "grep" to evaluate resumes, and how Google has taken the lead in all things mental because of their straight-up engineering skills.

The very fact that Google invented MapReduce, and Microsoft didn't, says something about why Microsoft is still playing catch up trying to get basic search features to work, while Google has moved on to the next problem: building Skynet^H^H^H^H^H^H the world's largest massively parallel supercomputer. I don't think Microsoft completely understands just how far behind they are on that wave.

Great stuff.