Name: Anonymous 2010-02-14 10:43
Everyone who has ever taken a high school programming class is bound to have met some interesting people. Tell us about them.
I knew a guy who was absolutely terrible at programming. Whenever the teacher gave us one of her ENTERPRISE JAVA assignments to do, he couldn't do it on his own. Printing and variable management he could handle, but algorithms as simple as converting seconds to hours/minutes/seconds were beyond the scope of his abilities.
Then one day, I was messing around on his calculator and found a bunch of TI-BASIC programs. It turns out, the guy was pretty good with that abomination of a language. He had at least 14 different programs on there, way more complicated than anything he'd done on our computers. I guess that just goes to show how trying to start kids off with an object-oriented language cripples them, and even as limited an imperative language as TI-BASIC can get them to actually understand how to make computers work for them. From that day on, I had a new-found respect for him. Sure, he might have never become an EXPERT PROGRAMMER, but he could have done so much more, if it weren't for our flawed education system. If only they had started him off with C instead of Java (and motherfucking Alice before that), he might be making Pac-Man clones to amuse himself now.
I must add in, though, that all of his programs consisted of nothing but interesting and creative ways to draw dicks on the screen and call the operator a faggot.
I knew a guy who was absolutely terrible at programming. Whenever the teacher gave us one of her ENTERPRISE JAVA assignments to do, he couldn't do it on his own. Printing and variable management he could handle, but algorithms as simple as converting seconds to hours/minutes/seconds were beyond the scope of his abilities.
Then one day, I was messing around on his calculator and found a bunch of TI-BASIC programs. It turns out, the guy was pretty good with that abomination of a language. He had at least 14 different programs on there, way more complicated than anything he'd done on our computers. I guess that just goes to show how trying to start kids off with an object-oriented language cripples them, and even as limited an imperative language as TI-BASIC can get them to actually understand how to make computers work for them. From that day on, I had a new-found respect for him. Sure, he might have never become an EXPERT PROGRAMMER, but he could have done so much more, if it weren't for our flawed education system. If only they had started him off with C instead of Java (and motherfucking Alice before that), he might be making Pac-Man clones to amuse himself now.
I must add in, though, that all of his programs consisted of nothing but interesting and creative ways to draw dicks on the screen and call the operator a faggot.