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Search - ""introduction to programming""
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At introduction of new class teacher asked which _one_ of the following isn't a programming language:
- Swift
- Pseudocode
- Haskell
- HTML
Took my chance on HTML, but apperantly pseudocode is less of a programming language according to him.30 -
This years~
It’s a class that introduce an introduction to programming.
First weeks of the class.
T: “For those who already know this basic stuff , You can take a final test. If you pass, you get an ‘A’ and dont have to attend to this class for the rest of this term.”
Me: “Fuck yeah~ Let’s do this”
—8 -
Am I the only one who is triggered by seeing all of the stupid articles claiming Java is bad introduction language? Just becuase Standford decided to change it to JavaScript? What the actual fuck? How students should learn the fundamentals concept of OOP in scripting language?
Don't get me wrong, I hate using Java for real life projects. But there is a reason why almost every university use it as introduciton language. It's great start to learn programming. Saying that the 'Hello World' in Java is complex and can scare people away, it's complete nonsens. For fuck sake, yes programming should be fun, but it is also hard. People can understand that they are going to learn what 'public static voiď means later. It's the structure of many Computer Science classes. It's the assigments that are not designed in engaging and fun way for newcomers. That's the problem, not the language.21 -
Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.
That time when...
He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.
He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.
He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.
He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).
He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).
He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.
He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.
He set up a new email account for each individual online service.
He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).
He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).
He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).
He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.
He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.
He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.
He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.
He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).
He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.
(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).
He ate a sim card.
He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).
He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.
He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).
He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).
He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.
I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.26 -
Inspired by the comment I posted on another rant.
My uni decided to be one of those progressive tech schools that start people with Python. Mind you, I had prepared myself with studying as much as I could with math and programming by automating things and similar stuff in our computer when I was at my previous job, so I had a better idea as to what i could expect.
Introduction to computer science and programming with Python or some shit like that was the name of the class, and the instructor was a fat short ugly woman with a horrible attitude AND a phd in math, not comp sci and barely any industrial knowledge of the field.
She gave us the "a lot of you will fail" speech, which to me is code for "I suck and have no clue what I am doing"
One assignment involved, as per the requirements the use of switch cases. Now, unless someo knew came about, Python does not have swio cases. Me and a couple of less newbie like students tried to point out that switch cases were non existent and that her switch case example was in Javascript, not python, curly braces and everything. She told us to make it work.
We thought that she meant using a function with a dictionary and we pass the key and shit, a simple way of emulating the switch case.
NOPE she took points and insisted that she meant the example. We continuously pointed out that her example was in JS and that at the time Python did not have switch cases. The nasty woman laughed out and said that she didn't expect anyone to finish the assignment with full points.
Out of 100 points everyone got a 70. No problem. Wrote a detailed letter to the dean. Dean replied and talked to her (copied her in the email because fuck you bitch) and my grade was pulled up to full mark.
Every other class I had with her she did not question me. Which was only another class on some other shit I can't remember.
Teachers are what make or break a degree program. What make or break the experience, going to college is putting too much faith on people. If you ask me, trade certification, rigorous training is the future of computer science, or any field really. Rather than spending 4+ years studying a whoooole lotta shit for someone to focus on one field and never leave it.17 -
Sitting in an introduction to C++ class (I've been programming for 5 years but every job wants to see a degree even if it means taking boring intro classes)
I see the professor write code like this....
First: Ever heard of break;
Second: I know it's not wrong to write it like this but ever heard of spaces!!!!!!!14 -
So this happened last week.
Last week I went as a volunteer to give an introduction class basic programming to some guys and gals who are going to attend computer science soon next year.
The class lasted one week and we had done some basic algorithms and programming in Python.
Besides that we also did some very basic websites (html, css and javascript).
Obviously all those people were very enthusiastic.
Some were a little bit too enthusiastic...
There were these 2 guys who were best friends. They already knew everything apparently. Even though they just finished high school they had been programming for over 10 years, had already made countless of websites, applications, 'hacked Windows', RATs and some amazing games.
So there were some people there who never had programmed before. I started giving the lecture and warned people who already knew some basics of programming the first day might be a quite boring but I could not simply skip it obviously.
Those 2 dickheads acted like the biggest childs ever, started screaming in class, making sure everyone knew they were bored, and were constantly complaining to me that they know what print, for, while and strings were. I stayed calm and tried to explain them again I simply couldn't skip parts of the lecture for them.
Every hour and every day it started getting worse and worse with them. Not only but the whole class were furiously mad at them. Some other students even started screaming at them. They screamed back insulting everyone they even didn't what php was and stupid stuff like that.
At some point they interrupted me AGAIN and asked me how long I programmed. I told him little them over 5 years or something. They started laughing at me. Those 2 dickheads looked at me like they were so much better than me because they programmed over 10 years.
At some point, almost the last day, I had enough of their bullshit, interruption, screaming, insulting other students who asked questions, ... I said you know what, you give the lecture!
They refused because they felt too good for all these other 'noobs' (the other students). They would never become good and blah blah more bullshit.
I said alright, we're doing websites, you've made some websites, show me your most impressive website.
He was happy and felt honered.
He sent me the whole folder and I showed his website on code on the big screen in the room.
Then I said: "Everyone, pay close attention to this!"
That dickhead smiled and felt good
Me: "This is how NOT to make a website"
I started explaining to everyone all things that were complete shit and all things that were straight up sins.
That one friend of the dickhead stayed quiet. The other dickhead became as red as a tomato. At some points you even saw tears in his eyes. At some point he insulted me I was a scriptie and simply left.
The class started clapping.
One of the weirdest but also best moments of my life
Moral: Don't act like a complete bigheaded dickhead, don't feel better than everyone and show some respect
Thank you for reading
Have a nice day!3 -
Yknow, I want to make an android app that I have in my mind for about half a year now and I already tried twice, both with Kotlin and with Java but everytime I try it's just pain and suffering and frustration...
No it's not because of the language, I like Java and I like Kotlin too and I'd say I'm at least decent at Kotlin and really good in Java...
No no.. the issue is the fucking Android SDK and the mix-and-match documentation available online!!!
Every fucking time I want to implement some sort of UI element, user action or a background service and I start googling how to do it It comes with with at least 3 different stack overflow solutions, all of them saying "that way of doing it is deprecated, instead you should X" and looking up the OFFICIAL FUCKING DOCS it will just make me roll up in the corner and cry because of how fucking inconsistent it is and the retarded domain language it uses... fucking transactions for fucking fragments inside fucking activities... because I guess the word "screen"/"view"/"template" or something similar natural just was too mainstream for the all knowing alphabet soup that google is...
And then you start looking up what the fucking difference even is and how to code it up only to find out there's at least 12 other opinions on how fragments should be used and what should be an activity and what should be a damn fragment...
But that's not all, that's just the base... I get a headache even thinking about how the fucking inflating of templates and the entire R. notation works. You want to open a fucking tiny corner menu with the settings options? WELL THEN YOU FUCKING BETTER REMEMBER TO IMPLEMENT IT THROUGH SOME SORT OF EVENT AND INFLATE THE MENU YOURSELF EVEN THOUGH ITS THE SAME FUCKING THING WITH STATIC STRINGS...
AND WHY THE FUCK DO I NEED LIKE 4 NEW FILES TO IMPLEMENT A FUCKING LISTVIEW...
also talking about ListViews... what was wrong with "ListView"... Why do we need a "RecyclerView"... oh right... because the fucks fucked the fuck up and all the legacy components were designed by a monkey and are next to useless! SO WE NEEDED A NEW NAME FOR THE FIXED VERSION, CANT NAME IT LISTVIEW AGAIN... FUCK YOU...
honestly... if I got a dolar for every "what the fuck android" I said during trying to understand that mess I'd be richer by a few hundred...
oh oh oh, but you know what? You don't like the android SDK? that's fine, you can use fucking React or Flutter or something... yeah.. because instead of torturing myself with the android SDK I want to torture myself with an abstraction of the same SDK and JavaScript as the fucking cherry on top... HAVE YOU FUCKING SEEN THE CODE FLUTTER SHOWS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS THE "Introduction" ?!!!
Look at this piece of shit:
[code in attached image, we could really use a proper Markdown support at least for rants]
THAT'S NOT EVEN THE ENTIRE THING, THAT'S JUST THE *REALLY* UGLY PART...
The fucking nesting... What is it with JS and all the fucking nesting everytime?! It looks like shit.... It reads like shit as well...
WHY, in the name OF FUCK, IS THERE MORE THAN 5 ANDROID FRAMEWORKS and ALL of them... used this FUCKING NOVEL idea of programming using A FUCKING BRACKET WALL
It always looks like:
(code(code[code{code(code{code()})}]));
If I wanted to make a fucking app or a website using fucking Haskell I'd do that.... at this point reading assembly code feels like heaven compared to this retardation... Why is this so popular?! WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE SEE IN IT?! Clearly it's not the aesthetics... it looks like a fucking frog vomit running down an emus leg, fuck that.... I don't even hate classic JavaScript, it's a good enough language and it does what I tell it to... but these ugly fucking frameworks like react, angular and whatever else uses this fucking format can go fuck right off. This is not the way JS is gonna get a better name for itself...
So:
Fuck Google
Fuck the marionette that designed the Android SDK
Fuck the Hellspawn the came up with the "functional-like" way of using JavaScript
Fuck everyone that thinks "JavaScript everywhere" is a good thing
And deeply future-fuck everyone that makes a new framework following any of these standards, stucks a .js at the end of the name and releases his hairball.js of an invention into the fucking world....
It's a mess... fuck everything android related...14 -
I AM TIRED
warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.
People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.
A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.
A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!
Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.
Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.
Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!
And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!
And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.
Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.
I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.
This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!
Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:
"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."
MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!
And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."
YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?
I am just tired of all those fuckers.13 -
So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...
While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".
So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.
It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?
No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.
You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).
To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).
It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.
For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.
That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.
I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.
When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.
He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.
There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.
I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.
My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.
Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...
Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...10 -
My introduction to programming and computers is quite different than most as in I didn't start programming first, I started by taking electronic parts from my toys and repurposing them or using them in different things, we had a computer I used to play games with but at age 7 my father died and my mother needed money so she sold it, the next laptop I got was at age 11 and then I started coding.
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When I was having Introduction to Programming in the first year of college, the teacher said something that stuck to me:
"Always program as if the guy who ends up mantaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
I later found out that it was a quote by Martin Golding. But it really motivated me to keep decent documentation of every method o.o1 -
I swear I hate seeing these wannabe programmers sharing their shit content on social media. I mean, I respect people who are getting into programming and giving it their best. But one just doesn't write "Fuck Types" when talking about a Dart. I mean, atleast open the introduction page of that language before you jump and start giving people "pro tips". Stop skimming over technologies/languages and dive a bit deep to understand how it works.9
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!rant
My love for Clojure is so deep that I have invested the whole company. Over the past months just everyone came up to me and asked me, if I may teach them some Clojure programming. With everyone I mean literally everyone working in this company - fellow programmers, the ladies from HR, the Sales Team and even the CEO.
So today I gave a two hour introduction to the whole team on how to Clojure (in absolute basic terms).
The team has just voted that we will do that every friday starting next week for the rest of the year.
If you have passion, show it.9 -
Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.
This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.
I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.
I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.
My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.
It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.
Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛4 -
I know I haven't been responding to a lot of you lately. I've been busy helping neighbors and my community, doing MAAAAAATH, working on my car, and moving a shit ton of scrap and lumber.
I've been thinking about getting a motorcycle. Fuck, maybe I'm experiencing a midlife crisis, but early.
Been busy doing some design work as well for the game, and arrived at something that I'm satisfied with enough that I might demo it.
I'm also looking for a job, and I think I might give up programming as a career path and persue welding or trucking or something considering theres basically zero opportunities for it unless you went to college.
It's good to have hobbys anyway. And who wants to turn their hobby into a job right?
Anyway, thats whats been going on with me.
Completely unrelated, but heres a really fantastic introduction to the basics of type theory:
https://wscp.dev/posts/tech/...2 -
Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?
- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.
Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.
But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!
After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:
- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.
Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.
Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.7 -
When I was in my first year in university, at the Introduction to Programming class, we had to do a Java project and my partner was someone who was always bragging about how much he knew about programming. Me being someone who was learning programming by the moment I started the course I thought he was going to help and teach me cool stuff.
The first phase was due to deliver in one week and literally my code was all original and my partners code was all copies of others work. Out project could'vw been graded 0 because of his code (because they used a programm that compared variables of each project to see if.they fins copies). He practically didn't gave the effort to try to code, just copies. I spent the whole week correcting his work so that I wasnt penalized in the end...1 -
> be me
> studying 1.5 years liberal arts stuff and general education class at community college
> transfer to a 4 year university.
> realize I need a major
> Realize I also I wanted to 9ne day have a family.
> realize family would need money
> "struggling actor" not a great choice
> pray about what I should be doing
> get distinct impression that instead of attending the session on majors at the college of fine and performance arts to go to session with the college of Science and engineering.
> hear pitch for computer science.
> signup for introduction to programming taught with c++.
> A couple semesters down the line take 3 classes all at once Discrete Math 1, Linear Algebra, and database design and administration.
> around week 6 realize that all 3 classes revolved around sets and set logic and set math.
> realize rdbs's are "applied" set math and that Each class a little more "applied" than the former.
> Be genius at SQL and set math
> havereally smart database teacher mentored me
> get introduced to the recruiter at the career fair.
> get interviews
> get flown out for 2md interview
> get internship
> do work, and get project back under budget
> a job offer
> finish senior year
> start as a "real" developer supporting business data and analytics.
> ???
> profit.3 -
I Started in 2012 at 12 years old with Minecraft as an introduction to computer programming. I created a few of my own mods and released them to the forums. I think my name was "lilwillis2" if you want to look them up. Once I created mods, I got into game development. I used The Cherno's game programming tutorials and a few others on youtube. After having my fun with game Dev and the debt of College soon to come, I got into developing my own apps, which got me into using react-native. React native made me realize that I should probably try to stay up to date with the latest frameworks and languages, so that I can create a surpieror product in much less time. It also made me realize how quickly programming changes. Last year, before getting into react-native, I got a summer job using Django and mezzanine at a local company as a web developer and they want me to work there again this year, maybe even on a salary with a pay raise. I recently turned 18 and I already look at code I wrote a few months ago as crap 😂, but hey it means I'm improving quickly!
BTW, if anyone knows any tips on paying/saving for college, please do let me know!1 -
Sometimes life takes unexpected turns:
I studied mechanical engineering and did some "computer stuff" in my free time, you know, "programming" with Java, toyed around with HTML/CSS/PHP a few years ago, some local server stuff with a raspberry pi, nothing fancy.
Half a year ago i got hired as engineer first but they said they needed an "IT Guy" also.
What i did since then
*Researching, Testing and Planning the introduction of an ERP software
*Planning, coordinating and (partially) setting up a new server for the company (actually two cause redundancy (heavy lifting got done by our IT partner, its not like i suddenly know how to do the entire windows server administration)
*Writing 3 minor tools for some guys in the company in java
*Creating numereous excel vba scripts that make work a lot easier
*doing all the day to day business that comes up when absolutly noone know how to use a pc in the company
*consulting the boss about webshops and websites in general and finding a decent partner
*and some engineering
Did i mentioned that i studied mechanical engineering? I know nothing about all this, or rather, i know enough to know that i know not enough.
My current side project is creating a small intranet, so creating a new VM in Hyper V, setting up some OS (probably slim CentOS), getting a Webserver running and making it somewhat secure. Then i need to create some content, i am very close to just install a mediawiki and call it a day. If i write anything in PHP i fear that i make way to many erros or just reinvent the wheel, on the other hand, i couldnt find anything resembling what i need. I also had to create the front end side, i knew CSS around 2010, there is probably tons of stuff i dont know and i will make so many errors.
This is frustrating, everything i touch feels like i am venturing the beaten path but noone ever showed me the ropes so everything i do feels like childs play. I need an adult. Also the biggest Question remains: What i am?1 -
I recently started studing on universty of technology. One of the classes is called "introduction to programming" where students learn how to code in C/C++. Of course it would be extremly useless for me so i told my lecturer about it. He told me that i can skip all lectures and come only to take tests. And i have to make a simple C program for the labs as well.
When I saw him for the first time i noticed that he has a apple laptop...
(so i thought he was a apple fanboy)
But when i approached him at the end of the lecture i saw that he had installed WINDOWS ON IT.
Fucking respect.2 -
I started doing teaching assistance in an Introduction Course to R (for the 3rd year in a row); for the big majority of them, this is the first course where they learn some basics of coding.
Now, I know many of us were the same when we started, but sometimes I wonder... have I ever really been as lost as some students? I mean, I had to teach to a student how to move a .txt from the downloads folder to another folder. Wasn't this supposed to be the digital generation?
Even my code is never as frustrating as teaching a programming language... I forecast more rants in the following days!8 -
For those who speak some Japanese and want to expand their skill set a bit, I found a great introduction to PHP in Japanese a few months back, and have been reading through it primarily with the purpose of learning programming vocabulary and figuring out how to express concepts properly from a grammatical standpoint.
If anyone's interested, here's the link: https://www.javadrive.jp/php/
Scroll down the page for an index of topics.6 -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"9 -
Here's my idea. In light of all the efforts to teach kids how to do programming, why not start with an introduction to discrete mathematics instead? From a lot of the programs I've seen, the kids are taught different structures such as if else, while, and for loops, but they don't attempt to start teaching them about recursive methods or even other structures such as linked lists, queues, dequeues, binary trees, heaps, different sorts, and other things. Am I just not looking deep enough into those programs? Or are the creators of these programs not wishing to cover those things because they feel like children wouldn't be able to comprehend such things?4
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My older brother introduced me to linux and android custom roms when I was like 11. So I flashed my old sony Ericson phone with custom roms from xda and tried Ubuntu live CDs on my mother's old 40gb hdd laptop.
But my introduction to programming was when I saw some videos about the raspberry pi on YouTube.
I was like 14 and programmed basic scripts for my raspberry pi in nano over putty or notepad++.
At first I didn't even knew to intendent but in the process of my first project (Python sunrise alarm clock with tts) I learned many valuable things about Python and Linux/Debian.
The years after that I learned more with my now multiple RaspberryPIs, Arduinos and other hardware.
So in conclusion RaspberryPIs, the diy/open source community and especially my brother introduced me to programming.
I am now doing bigger projects with my brother and have (really basic) knowledge of java,Javascript,php,html,Arduino/C++ and Python. -
To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.
The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).
The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.
Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.
1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.
Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.
2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.
Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.
3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.
Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.
4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.
Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.
5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.
Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.
6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.
(TBC)4 -
during a programming introduction course on loops my pals started writing `for` loops instead of `while` loops like so:
`for (;expression;) {}`
spent weeks explaining why it's wrong. needless to say, they still do it. had to hinder myself from ripping my hair off my head11 -
First day in introduction to programming. We were the first course to learn Python instead of Java. The whole lecture consisted only of what Python is good for and how powerful it is.
He finished with the statement: “... and in the real life, no one writes applications in Python.“6 -
Yesterday, I started taking the new programming classes in my school. I am utterly disappointed, before even teaching my classmates who are new to programming some basic python or javascript, the teacher started the class with teaching arduino and C and because of that many of my friends have since dropped the class and we are only 3 left out of an original 20.
Although some of you might say that arduino is a good introduction to programming, I believe you should teach a kid basic python or java before getting into arduino or raspi..etc11 -
On the introduction day of my Computer science course, we all were to sit in "welcome groups" and tell a little bit about our programming background.
Most of us were beginners, but one of the guys told me he'd been "messing around with some Java a while back", so I thought I'd ask him about help when we had our first real Java programming assignment. I was surprised to learn that he wasn't able to help me at all. He seemed to know less than me, a complete beginner, on the different OO concepts and Java syntax. Furthermore, he seemed to have zero interest in anything development related.
It was later revealed that he meant that he had been messing around with INSTALLING Java on his computer a while back, but never really made it work. *facepalm*
Needless to say, he was a great group member in the assignments that followed. /s2 -
Ok a quick, short story time.
Might write longer one later.
Few months ago i asked my professor if i could do something to skip all those labs and lectures from "introduction to programming". He agreed, but i have to take tests as well and make a program showing that i can use all of C/C++ functions, syntax required by the subject. After few months I didnt managed to do ANY significant progress. That happens when i dont have any directions, i just get 10 000 000 ideas and 0 motivation to implement them (with that many ideas my mind becomes tangled as well). I can bet that im not the only guy who has a similar issue, but keep in mind my mental situation isnt that great; more about that in the next rant.3 -
iAPPLIED CS UNIVERSITY, DAY 1 (2018-09-24)
11:00 UTC+3: Arrived at the secretary's office to complete my registration. I met quite some people; I forgot the names of some. I spent some time over there, so I took the 13:00 class instead of the 11:00 one. It's still early, so we pick whichever we want.
13:00: Procedural Programming at the Computer's lab. The computers were running Windows 8.1! 😱 I might connect to my laptop via RDP. It would be very cool. The course was about C, but the first time was just an introduction. We are going to use Code::Blocks. We were also explained the (HTTP only) web platform in which we are logged in via our passwords and submit our assignments. The professor was very nice, but this day at least was very boring. I was watching CodeMinkey cartoons, trying to solve AdLitterams.
18:00: Back for Applied Mathematics I. At the same computer lab. No lesson did happen, because we have to s learn theory stuff first (every Friday I think). Back to home.
Tommorrow is going to be a hard day...:wq1 -
In my native language the word Java means Week, so a couple of years ago when the second year of uni started there was an introduction to the distributed programming class and the professor had made some slides to present the syllabus. It went
Java 1 ...
Java 2 ...
Java 3 ...
.
.
.
Java 7 ...
Java 8 ...
Until here it was all good, then came this
Java 9 ...
Java 10 ...
Java 11 ...
Java 12 ...
Java 13 ...
Java 14 ...
I was like .... oh shit, I'm way outdated.6 -
I was thinking to read some books on algorithm and mathematics required in programming, especially for CP. After some searching I got across some books that are considered great in the field. Among the books, 'Introduction to Programming by CLRS', 'Algorithms Design Manual by Steven Skiena', 'Concrete Mathematics by Donald E. Knuth' and 'The Art of Programming by Donald E. Knuth', in which order should I read them? I've already started reading CLRS as it would be required in my college course too.5
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I missed this last week... so too bad ;)
My introduction into programming was rather slow. When I was a child, we had an Apple IIc, but there were no disks. When you'd boot it up, you got a prompt and I recall being able to type commands into it that someone told me was "Apple BASIC".
At the same time, our family computer was a 386 and it came with something called GWBasic. I was a huge Mortal Kombat fan as well, and I recall finding the moves for the game on an AOL usenet. I took them all and wrote a program in BASIC that let you search and find moves for your character. I distributed this on some floppies to friends.
After that I lost interest. My "Information Systems" shop in high school was more about how to use Office than it was about programming. A few years later I found out that you could run your own text-based games (MUDs) and I quickly jumped into that and the C language.
From there, I was in and out of programming - C, to C++. Java and PHP, then back to Java. It would be about 15 years later until I finally realized I wasn't bad at this and land a job doing it. :) -
In my school we had a CS lab and we were supposed to do lab assignments.
I had a book which gave a basic introduction on event driven programming, and introduced me to two new functions which I couldn't have ever known(I got internet in 2013) if I had gone with just the curriculum, kbhit() and gotoxy(). With this new knowledge I created my first 2d game. And that feeling of creating something no one expects and something fun, which also gets you attention of the whole room(Nothing like that was ever created in that lab, it was a shitty school), made me realize that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. 😃 -
Is it just me or are books on algorithms split between being too simplistic and being too detailed to be practical. I read Donald Knuth's book "The Art of Computer Programming Vol.1" read about 10% of it , which is like 3 chapters. I really enjoyed those chapters, Knuth's is such a genius but then the rest of the book was so complicated that the introduction and definition of terms was longer than some whole chapters in the same book. I decided to look for another, found a really good one, but it was analyzing algorithms in Java, sigh, I hardly code in Java so it was exactly easy for me to follow when he keeps mentioning the "comparable" attribute on sorting algorithms. I then got another really followed it till the keep on referencing indicator variables, I had read 3 books now and had not had of these indicator variables. Am sure they are not that common in the Computer Science literature so I was left wondering why I had to learn to analyze code with indicator variables though it was not a standardized in the "Computer Culture" would I be the only one who does this?.. I hence gave up on learning algorithms till I got that book that was just right for me5
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Hello guys, i need some advice:
Our school is having a "auto-management" (idk how to translate) period, it lasts 3 or 4 days just before christmas vacation, and in those days students get to organize courses about pretty much everything to teach stuff to other students (exept stuff like video games cuz the principal is closed-minded), some friends asked me to make a course about programming in c# because they are interested, i thought it was cool so i said OK.
Now i'm thinking how to structure it, it's going to be 2 "lessons" of 2 hours each, and it's open to everyone in the school.
I don't want to do a full blown course explaining everything, i just want to give them a kick start and point them to the right direction, I thought about explaining some "theory" in the first lesson, I'm assuming almost everyone that will come never did programming stuff, so i'm thinking of explaining stuff like how a computer works, why you need a compiler, etc.. maybe based on the introduction from learncpp.com without getting to much into the details and then explaining how c# works and its grammar.
Then in the second lesson i'll try to code togheter some stuff (We'll have just one pc attached to a projector).
So, how would you do this ? I mean i never tried explaining programming to someone else and i'm self-taught i looked at the guide on msdn but it starts directly by giving you an hello world, should i follow it ? I fear i'd get too thecnical and they wouldn't understand me, do you know some good guide i can use as a reference ?
ps: there's going to be max 30 people1 -
My introduction to programming was while I was working in construction management trying to automate alot of the really boring stuff and stream line processes...
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I been teaching someone python for a few day with 2-3 hour each day. It has been very pleasant to teach him programming since he have a goal in mind. He already know what kind of program we wanted to build.
He is a novice and not familiar with programming. It have been a good chance to see how the novice look at the python. I been given a chance to ask the answer like
"Why do we throw exception?" ,
"Why do we put define function at the top of the file and not at __main__?"
"Why do I need to use constructor?" ,
"Why should I call parent constructor in the child constructor?"
Here is the main question.
I have been wondering "should I teach him multi inheritance and the diamond problem?" I haven't been using multi inheritance for a while other than the exercise I done when I started programming and cannot think of the situation to use multi inheritance. I know in other language we use multi inheritance (kind of) regularly by extending multiple interface. I wanted to ask if multi inheritance is common in python.
Another question I have is how should I introduce him to gui programming in a simple manner? I am thinking of introduction him to the gui framework which haved WYSIWYG editor like "Remi"10 -
We have been given C++ Game development project for Introduction to programming for Engineers cousre......from out of 6 in my group I m the only person with programming experince ...other are new babies to C++…………
My fellow Programmers please give me advises and Suggestions for this Game development group projects to programme awesome game.3