Why are they all so bad at programming?
This is my second semester at Uni and I am seriously helping seniors complete their idiotic Java programming assignments. It took me three fucking hours to explain one guy the difference between a compiler and an interpreter.
I thought Universities would be filled with programming geniuses, what the hell?
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Anonymous2011-03-16 3:55
>>36
"What you love" is your hobby, it won't earn you money for living.
>>41
Son, let an old man give you some advice. When I was in grade school my father was a successful lawyer, and he told me that one day I would be one too. Years later I ended up in law school. I hated it, but I knew I could do it well. After passing my bar exam, I went to work for the state. I pushed papers at the DA's office for years until I finally became a prosecuting attorney myself. Ten years later I realized I wasted 25 years of my life. I stopped practicing law, and I started tinkering with computers. I fell in love with programming and found a job working for an engineering firm.
Since then I have been at peace with my life. Do what you love, or else the success won't be worth it assuming you even get that far.
>>53
There's one thing about this story that makes it a little bit suspect: no mention of salaries at all. As if it was written by an autistic kid who believes that people have jobs because they love what they do or want some abstract success or some such autistic thing. So the whole thing reads as a story of the life of a painter made up by a blind person -- OK at the first glance, but really weird if you look closer.
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Anonymous2011-03-16 7:05
Haven't I mentioned it already, that LISP is a bad hobby? Ideally, your hobby should help you obtain social contacts and empower you in some way. So being a star wars fan or writing articles for some wiki are nice hobbies in all respects, but what gives you LISP, besides self-destructive tendencies?
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Anonymous2011-03-16 8:18
>>58 but what gives you LISP, besides self-destructive tendencies?
Don't tell me you didn't see this one coming... autism.
>>57
How can a blind person paint if he can't see!
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Anonymous2011-03-16 14:56
>>61
By applicating paint until the canvas is all wet.
That's all painting IS, you italicized-bang loving FIEND.
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Anonymous2011-03-16 15:41
>>57
I see where you were going with this, but I just assumed that ``success'' was a euphemism for a high salary and he was just being polite by not flaunting whatever fortune he accrued.
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Anonymous2011-03-16 16:00
Programming is a dirty peasant's work of 21st century. What "success" are you talking about? There only a few rich programmers and they all succeeded because of their social skills.
The problem with college CS kiddies is that they all want to go into the video game industry. They want to be game programmers, and think that all that that entails is beta testing. They don't know the kind of challenge that programming can be, and probably don't know that there is real science in computer science: it ain't all about the programming. There is collection, interpretation, and reporting on data. I just let my computer run for 15 hours generating data on the time variation of an algorithm as its data set size grows, which I am going to compare with the predicted asymptotic complexity of the algorithm (for an assignment in AI: the teacher is totally anal about writing up results of assignments, but he brings in grant money like a beast and makes his "employees" do the same). That's science in computer science.
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Anonymous2011-03-16 17:12
>>67 writing up
You sucks. And your prose sucks. Real programmers don't write even comments, because papers and math formulae are for retards.
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Anonymous2011-03-16 17:30
>>68
If you want /g/, you know where to find it. Computer scientists are not the same as programmers; get used to it.
>>67
I overheard some math majors talking about first-year CS students today. Apparently all of them just want to get drunk, and spend most of their time inebriated, with little or no ability to display academic professionalism.
This may be the secret explanation we've been waiting for: the average idiot who falls in love with programming in high school does so because they have no friends, and being put in a situation where they're not living with their parents forces them to confront a world full of other humans, alcohol, and amusement. So seeing, they ignore all responsibility and just drown themselves in whatever the fuck they feel like, completely ignoring anything sciencey in computing.
The real problem is that they can't admit to themselves that the degree they want is at a lowly community college, and that they're not university material.
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Anonymous2011-03-16 17:51
I study at Stanford CS. There are plenty of good hackers here. It seems you have selected a wrong school.
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Anonymous2011-03-16 18:59
>>69 Computer scientists are not the same as programmers
Yeah! Lowly creatures are far inferior to us, hackers, and must express their thoughts, using natural language and pseudoscientific math formulae, instead of glorious LISP. CS people can't create video games, only writing crappy design documents, nobody cares about.
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Anonymous2011-03-16 19:03
I would sell ten best computer scientists for one mediocre graphic artist.