Subj : Re: Are programmers like this in the real world?
To   : comp.programming
From : Matthias Kaeppler
Date : Sat Jul 23 2005 02:30 am

What kind of people do you expect visiting a 
programming class? Certainly few computer 
scientists and/or professional programmers. Those 
classes are usually held for people who are NOT 
proficient with programming concepts. They're 
mostly for people who are studying in other fields 
than CS (I am studying CS and I haven't even heard 
of a programming lecture for CS students at our 
university...).

Overall I'd say you shouldn't generalize this 
experience. A friend of mine (also a CS student) 
had to work together with a couple of math 
students for a computer implementation of some 
numerical algorithm, and he complained that they 
couldn't even understand the most trivial things 
in a programming language like loops, etc...

For the same project, our math prof provided a 
couple of classes to ease our task (mostly 
numerical stuff like LR-decomposition of matrices 
and such), and boy was his code ugly. He somehow 
thought it would be a good idea to write 
everything inside the C++ class bodies. He 
obviously adopted this "technique" from Java 
although it has a totally different meaning in C++ 
to supply a method's implementation in the class body.

So you see, stupidity or lack of knowledge isn't 
specific to a certain kind, be it math or CS 
students or whoever.

Regards,
Matthias

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