I personally get annoyed when people try to correct the teacher. Unlike a lot of you (or so it seems), I go to a college with great CS teachers (RIT). They enforce style stuff, but not anally. They make us conform to the JavaDocs comment system and all that nonsense, and they make us check our code into CVS before submitting it, but I am of the opinion that these things will only help me in the future. People are always saying things in class like "Wouldn''t it be better to use such-and-such advanced technique that half the class isn''t capable of understanding yet?", and it just irritates me. The instructors at RIT clearly know more than any first-year student. They are paid to know more, and they''ve been programming for years and years. I know that that''s quite a bit different from what we''re talking about here, I was just reminded of that and felt like sharing. Anyway, you really should respect authority. Privately complaining is fine in my opinion, but just make sure to keep reminding yourself to not let any bitterness spill over into your interactions with those above you.

As for standards, I was taught to use the ClassName system and only use underscores for constants like MY_CONSTANT-type things. And I hate the practice of putting the ''{'' on the first line. Doing so is perpetuating an outdated practice, and it''s evil (in my opinion ).

I have to agree with Rishtar if you go to a good school it makes all the difference. You really do learn more than you can on your own if your teachers are good. It doesn''t have to be every teacher in the place is wonderful a handful of good teachers makes all the difference.

The whole "only those who can''t do teach" is not true. I have had some great profs who worked professionally for a number of years before deciding that they liked the academic world better. At least in the states CS professors are paid very well. At Texas A & M average professor salary is around 120K a year, on top of that you can research whatever you want.

quote:Original post by Rishtar
And I hate the practice of putting the ''{'' on the first line. Doing so is perpetuating an outdated practice, and it''s evil (in my opinion ).

All scoping practices can be labeled "outdated" with enough effort. Java style is just repurposed K & R - it''s 30 years old. Whitespace-delineation (eg Python) is just repurposed FORTRAN - it''s 50 years old!

And we haven''t even brought up Emacs-style:

int function(blah)  {     // blah     return 0;  } 

The fact is, there are a thousand conceivable ways to format code. Conventions are religious wars. The only important thing is to pick one and stick to it for any given project. In some cases you will not be the person picking the convention; get over it, or get/write a pretty printer.

I program using emacs. I''ve just developed the habit of backspacing before the ''{'' to put it where I want it. And I know that virtually anything can be outdated, I was just stating my opinion while maybe making others join me.

quote:Original post by graveyard filla
this thread has turned to complete crap... although maybe it never wasnt? it would be cool if a mod closed this, or i will just delete it... thanks

Just ignore it and let it die.

Yeah, it was crap from the beginning

Re: Correcting the teacher:
You must have much more "together" teachers than I've had. I often correct the teacher, and usually the teacher (and sometimes other students) thanks me for it.
If the teacher messes up a non-trivial point and no one questions or corrects it, it's going to end up in the notes of everyone taking the class (not counting those who aren't actually interested). That's Bad.

Often the teacher is up at the board writing from memory, while all the students have their books open in front of them. They can check it, The teacher can't (without stopping writing in order to go look it up).

Anyway, it's all about how you do it. "That's wrong, stupid! It should be $object->prop, not $object->$prop!" and "No, it is O(n)" aren't going to help anyone.
"Shouldn't that be void func(*b) instead of void func(&b)?" or "Why is it a<b instead of a<=b?" keeps the teacher from losing face and doesn't imply that you know more than them. (You probably don't, not by a long way)

For example; I had a teacher talking about binary trees mess up the alphabetic order (He had 'h' > 'l'). Binary trees are hard enough to understand without having an example in your notes that makes no sense.
I also had a latin teacher who would sometimes switch languages while writing out paradigms. Just like binary trees, memorizing the suffixes is hard enough without having the wrong ones written down!
Both teachers were VERY smart people, but everyone makes mistakes.

So, feel free to correct this post...
Unless you are correctly my period placement, I do that on purpose (American rules for periods and commas are... strange to say the least).
As a compulsive corrector, that's what bothers me the most. When the teacher decides to redefine something so that the book and the teacher have different answers. (Math teachers seem to be worst about this. I've had one teacher redefine "monotonic" and another that hated the word "infinity" (Rather bad when you're teaching Calc)).

EDIT: Yay <HTML>

[edited by - TravisWells on May 21, 2004 2:24:08 PM]