On 26.07.2017 04:47, Christopher Clements wrote:

> My high-school programming class was advertised as teaching people how to
> program in C and do all sorts of low-level stuff. I signed up thinking
> I might finally meet a "computer expert" that actually knew what they
> were talking about...
>
> The teacher began by forcing us all to make "hello world" applications
> IN JAVA!

For a beginner, java might be a good choice (plain old of course).

At our local university, the students (lower semesters) should just
learn simple things like sorting algorithms (wikipedia level), but
then are asked to repair the teacher's broken/incomplete C++ code,
with lots of template magic (hmm, do we have some hall of shame, where
I can upload his bloat ?).

As a friendly repititor I showed students how to do that in plain C.
Of course, they didn't pass the exam, as they didn't actually repair
his shitty code, but thrown it away.

From my perspective as seasoned consultant, this teacher failed his job
miserably (assuming, teaching software engineering really was his job
in the first place). And his code doesn't even look like he's got much
idea of C/C++ programming. I'm thinking about subscribing in the
university again and join that coures, just to have some fun ...

> When the assignments got more complex (still in Java), I decided to run
> vim off a flash drive to edit the sources because I was self-taught and
> doing something (somewhat) low-level. The teacher threatened to have me
> expelled for "hacking" because he didn't like the white text on a black
> background; we were only allowed to use the Eclipse IDE.

*rofl* that guy seemed to be totally incompetent. yes, I also had such
folks back in school. I still remember a situation (early 90th) when the
teacher tried to explain how hard drivers work. After his longer
monologue I had to step in and explain that ATA block addressing doesn't
have much to do w/ physical locations and asked him to explain why the
machine in front of me claims to have an hdd w/ 32 heads.

After some more similar actions I had my const 1+ for the rest of the
year and didn't need to be present anymore ...

> Please, KEEP DOING WHAT YOU'RE DOING!
> I have seen our "successors", and they are all brain-dead MCSEs!
> As members of the steadily-declining demographic of "old-fashioned"
> hackers, it falls to us to keep things in somewhat-usable states!

True. OTOH, just let folks make their horrible experiences (just from
time to time give some little notes about how easy, robust and cheap
things can be) ... sooner or later they come back to us, and we can
charge any rate :p

> I think that everyone should have to learn how to write a simple shell
> for an 8-bit architecture before they can be considered a real
> programmer. ;P

ACK.


--mtx