Exams

Hey /prog/

Had a programming examination today. I'm a second year comp. eng student at McMaster in Canada, and man, the kind of grief the exam gave my friends and I was..haha it was rough.

But as I was looking at the questions on the exam (for reference, it was basically Java, & C++), I had to ask myself: "What the hell is so great about OO programming?"

When it comes to Java, it bothers me that all objects are passed by ref, that casts are only checked at run-time, and just, well the overall slugishness I seem to feel when I'm trying to develop code. Is it wrong to feel a lack of interest (and a lack of a good mark) in a course I'm supposed to be enjoying, and paying for out of my own pocket?

I'm not going to pretend I'm a whiz kid at programming, I know there are members of /prog/ who could laugh at the questions had they seen the exam.

Anyways, I wanted to hear from you guys, share your experiences of crappy setbacks in college/uni from comp sci/software eng/comp eng, etc.

I just finished a college level class in Java and here's what pretty much came out of it:

-OO and class-based programming works good because you can separate your program into neat pieces, and you can work on one piece without such modifications screwing up the other pieces in the process.  This way, several people can each program their own class for a bigger program and the only puzzle to solve is the naming of the stuff that plugs each class together.  That's good.

--Making GUIs in Java is a pain in the ass.  I haven't yet looked at the C++ way yet (my teacher was challenging himself to make me prefer Java over C++) but I sure as hell didn't like the way Java handled things, especially with NetBeans, which created a clusterfuck of a code that didn't resemble anything I had seen before.  If there is a VB-style way of making GUIs with a .height, a .width, a .left and a .top, I haven't seen it in Java yet...  That sucks.