Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Dr. What
From : Adept
Date : Mon Feb 12 2024 21:47:46

 DW> the prof gave us the specs.  Every other class or so, he would change
 DW> the specs - just a bit - or add another small requirement (scope creep).
 DW> At the end, he told us why he did it that way - to simulate what you
 DW> will have to deal with on the job.

Yeah, that does seem like an excellent way to expose you to something that's more real-world like.

Though, in school, I remember switching IDE, language, code repository, and probably lots of other things with each different set of classes, so by the time things became requirement creep it just seemed like, "okay, someone else has another set of requirements for us to deal with".

But, yeah, not _quite_ the same, since theoretically the professor gave enough information at the beginning to know the final outcome.

 DW> I did the same thing for Chemistry class in high school.  My classmates
 DW> said "The teacher won't accept the printout".  But he did - along with
 DW> the source code for the BASIC program I wrote.  He then said I didn't
 DW> have to do the homework for this anymore because if I could teach a
 DW> computer how to do it, I must have mastered the concept.

Nifty! This reminds me of the Philosophy of Logic class that I took (and really enjoyed) where, as a final project sort of thing, the professor gave us a group project where we'd have to solve a 12-variable (or something like that) logic thing, determining which variables were true or false.

And he said something along the lines of it being much too complicated to brute force the answer.

But it was not remotely complicated for a computer, so my groupmate wrote a program that tried all possibilities, printed out all the possibilities, and highlighted the correct solution.

And then I took that knowledge, assumed the known-false conclusion and worked until I got a contradiction, and worked my way through the variables without worrying about going down any wrong paths.

We handed in the printout along with the logic, but it just got a question mark or something on it, so I think we just confused the professor. But someone used to humans doing logic things is going to have a different idea of what's possible to brute force than someone who thinks it through with a computer.

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