I think one big issue is that professors certainly don't care to explain how a certain building-block really affects something in the real world. For e.g. as Joel explains, how having all rows in a DB as fixed length dramatically improves performance vis-a-vis XML (because .. you know CPU operations :-) ) really will get students think through the strategy of "Oooo!Shiny! Let me use this" prevalent in lots of companies.
> You’ve built a marvelous palace but the foundation is a mess. Instead of a nice cement slab, you’ve got rubble down there. So the palace looks nice but occasionally the bathtub slides across the bathroom floor and you have no idea what’s going on.
That's how web development feels nowadays (it wasn't how it feel by then), and I fear we are moving more and more on that direction for every end-user software.
Joel certainly makes string-concatenation look difficult in C.
Maybe a couple of things to add:
1) It's surprisingly easy to carry around the size of strings next to the string. Then when you do a string concat like this, you can just add up the integer amounts and you know how much to allocate.
2) While it is harder to do this kind of ad-hoc string manipulation in C than in higher-level languages, it's worth noting that "the C way" is also "the disk way". Whatever string-copying function you write in C will likely just work for files too, whereas in a higher-level language you'll probably assume your Strings are in RAM, and then write some more code to instantiate a BufferedWhatever to copy your RAM Strings onto disk.
