Lol school

[VeryNiceGuy]

My old school blew a load of money to get a Mac Lab. (It's full of MACS if you don't get it.)

[mmavipc]

Back in middle school I has a Computers/Techonology teacher who said that you need things to have a fast computer
1: lots of RAM
2: lots of cpu memory
3: a high speed internet connection

okay, wtf

[ROBO_DONUT]

I don't get it.

[mmavipc]

[QUOTE=ROBO_DONUT;24852545]I don't get it.[/QUOTE]

1st issue: no cpu processing power 1 ghz is fine to him

2nd issue: you need a high speed internet connection to have a fast computer??

[dnt462]

[QUOTE=VeryNiceGuy;24852278]My old school blew a load of money to get a Mac Lab. (It's full of MACS if you don't get it.)[/QUOTE]

Just One? all my schools since elementary have had at least one Mac lab. My middle school had 3, And my high school has at least 5 of them, and then there are the macbooks. Plus, I even think we have a class of Itouch's.

[Blueridge]

[QUOTE=Jake951716;24834669]Couldn't think of a good title. Anyways, I'm in programming class in my school. For some reason, they are teaching Q Basic... aka MS-DOS. Any reason for teaching this? The other class, same grade, is learning java. Wtf.[/QUOTE]

Holy shit, my school is doing this and by checking your steam profile you live in the same city I do

[ROBO_DONUT]

[QUOTE=redsoxrock;24852969]Just One? all my schools since elementary have had at least one Mac lab. My middle school had 3, And my high school has at least 5 of them, and then there are the macbooks. Plus, I even think we have a class of Itouch's.[/QUOTE]
Is your school built from gold bars or something?

[dnt462]

No, The Taxes in my town are really high, And people in this town generally have mad monies.

[VeryNiceGuy]

Eh, we only had one. But they recently installed Windows 7 on all the computers I believe, except the Macs of course. :pseudo:

[Alex_DeLarge]

If you can stand QBasic, you can do anything.

[Gbps]

[QUOTE=Alex_DeLarge;24853564]If you can stand QBasic, you can do anything.[/QUOTE]
If you give up at QBasic, you will never know anything better.

[PvtCupcakes]

[QUOTE=Darwin226;24840871]My "Basics of programming" teacher said that C++ is the better version of C, that the only differences are the input/output methods and that C# is the next version of C++.
I think I win.[/QUOTE]

My teacher thinks the same group of people made C, C++, C#, and Java. And she claims that those languages were produced in that order. :smith:
Also, she keeps ranting about how great Pascal is. And she hates my usage of printf() in Java because "it's not the Java way".

Honestly, all computer classes in schools are garbage. I've yet to see one even partially bearable. The instructors typically have no real world experience because if they did they sure as hell wouldn't be teaching.

My teacher tried to tell me that commenting your braces like so:
[cpp]
int main()
{ //begin main
return 0;
} //end main
[/cpp]
was how you write "professional" code. When I didn't do that, she took 10 points off each of my 3 programs in the assignment. I called her out on that and said it was stupid and pointless and that in fact nobody does it. After she blew my argument off, I asked her if she had ever looked at anyone else's code other than her own. At that point she ignored my question and just yelled "Just do it because I said so."

:saddowns:

[robmaister12]

My Java teacher is actually really awesome. I'll be talking to my friends about something a little bit further than we have learned, or something a little bit more obscure, and he'll know exactly what I'm saying and pitch in his two-sense (and mention how it isn't allowed on the AP test)

Apparently, you can't use chars, the ? and ?? operators, and switch / case loops on the AP test. There's probably a lot more, but that's all he's explicitly told me about (not like I'd ever use the ? operator though...)

[editline]10:08PM[/editline]

And he definitely knows what he's talking about.

Guess I'm really lucky.

[turb__]

[QUOTE=PvtCupcakes;24855330]Honestly, all computer classes in schools are garbage. I've yet to see one even partially bearable. The instructors typically have no real world experience because if they did they sure as hell wouldn't be teaching.[/QUOTE]

Those who can't do, teach.

[editline]05:10PM[/editline]

[QUOTE=VeryNiceGuy;24852278]a Mac Lab. (It's full of MACS if you don't get it.)[/QUOTE]

Thanks, I wasn't too sure there...

[editline]05:10PM[/editline]

[QUOTE=Superbird;24838148]In my software development class we've done 1/2 the year on excel, and the other half on VB.net, Delphi and [b]C#[b/]. If I continued the subject next year we do a year on Delphi.[/QUOTE]

Why are you complaining?

[Wyzard]

[QUOTE=PvtCupcakes;24855330]My teacher tried to tell me that commenting your braces like so:
[cpp]
int main()
{ //begin main
return 0;
} //end main
[/cpp]
was how you write "professional" code. When I didn't do that, she took 10 points off each of my 3 programs in the assignment. I called her out on that and said it was stupid and pointless and that in fact nobody does it. After she blew my argument off, I asked her if she had ever looked at anyone else's code other than her own. At that point she ignored my question and just yelled "Just do it because I said so."[/QUOTE]
The "end" comment can be helpful on large functions, so that if you're looking at the end of the function and the beginning is off the top of the screen, you can see what function it's the end of. I've seen that done in professionally-developed code, though it's a matter of individual preference and not the norm. There's no need for it if the function is small enough that it all fits on one screen, because (assuming you're indenting properly) it's easy for the reader to find the beginning and read the name without having to scroll around.

Commenting the end of things like loops (e.g. "// end for") is also sometimes done.

The "begin" comment is, however, senseless. Nobody puts a screenful of whitespace between a function's signature and its opening brace, so if you're looking at the brace, you can see the signature too, and it's obvious what function it's the beginning of.

[sim642]

[QUOTE=PvtCupcakes;24855330]
My teacher tried to tell me that commenting your braces like so:
[cpp]
int main()
{ //begin main
return 0;
} //end main
[/cpp]
was how you write "professional" code. When I didn't do that, she took 10 points off each of my 3 programs in the assignment. I called her out on that and said it was stupid and pointless and that in fact nobody does it. After she blew my argument off, I asked her if she had ever looked at anyone else's code other than her own. At that point she ignored my question and just yelled "Just do it because I said so."

:saddowns:[/QUOTE]

I was like WTF when I read this. I have NEVER seen someone comment braces like that. Identing really does the trick. It might be useful to comment closing brace like that for long functions, but you shouldn't have very long functions anyways.

Though I have seen people comment preprocessor #endif in such way, because preprocessor stuff usually isn't idented.

[esalaka]

[QUOTE=sim642;24859225]Though I have seen people comment preprocessor #endif in such way, because preprocessor stuff usually isn't idented.[/QUOTE]

Sometimes it's commented even if it is, because a shitload of #endifs is isn't always really clear, indented or not.

[PvtCupcakes]

[QUOTE=Wyzard;24858125]The "end" comment can be helpful on large functions, so that if you're looking at the end of the function and the beginning is off the top of the screen, you can see what function it's the end of. I've seen that done in professionally-developed code, though it's a matter of individual preference and not the norm. There's no need for it if the function is small enough that it all fits on one screen, because (assuming you're indenting properly) it's easy for the reader to find the beginning and read the name without having to scroll around.

Commenting the end of things like loops (e.g. "// end for") is also sometimes done.

The "begin" comment is, however, senseless. Nobody puts a screenful of whitespace between a function's signature and its opening brace, so if you're looking at the brace, you can see the signature too, and it's obvious what function it's the beginning of.[/QUOTE]

Yeah it might make sense to comment the closing braces if you're getting 3, 4, or 5 indentation levels deep. But if your indentation level is shallow there is no point.

[aVoN]

Using Basic is really a bad choice. For beginners, it might be "ok" but not adequate.
At my university they teach them Scheme first and then Java and after that C++. Luckily I'm not studying computational science as my primer topic but as a minor so I could choose between them.

[editline]10:40PM[/editline]

[QUOTE=PvtCupcakes;24855330](...)
My teacher tried to tell me that commenting your braces like so:
[cpp]
int main()
{ //begin main
return 0;
} //end main
[/cpp]
was how you write "professional" code. When I didn't do that, she took 10 points off each of my 3 programs in the assignment. I called her out on that and said it was stupid and pointless and that in fact nobody does it.[/QUOTE]

That's stupid. The first think I learned about comments was [b]not to comment obvious stuff[/b]

[cpp]#include <cstdio> //include the header cstdio
#include <iostream> //include the header iostream
using namespace std; //Use the namespace std
int main(){ //begin main routine
int a = 0; //declare variable a and assign the value 0
cout << a + 5 << endl; //add 5 to a and return it in console
return 0; //return 0
} //end of main[/cpp]

The above exaple is such a stupid example and your teacher was doing exactly that stupid stuff. All you did was right and all she said was literally bullshit.

[Wyzard]

[QUOTE=aVoN;24868660]The first think I learned about comments was [b]not to comment obvious stuff[/b][/QUOTE]
You can often assess someone's skill level as a programmer by reading their comments, to see what they consider obvious and what they feel needs to be explained.

[VeryNiceGuy]

I always hated reading code that had more comments than actual code

[Pirate Ninja]

While this is web code this show's how alot of comments be usefull for example in a config

# Django settings for harlex project.

DEBUG = True
TEMPLATE_DEBUG = DEBUG

ADMINS = (
    # ('Your Name', '[e-mail]'),
)

MANAGERS = ADMINS

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3', # Add 'postgresql_psycopg2', 'postgresql', 'mysql', 'sqlite3' or 'oracle'.
        'NAME': 'harlex',                      # Or path to database file if using sqlite3.
        'USER': '',                      # Not used with sqlite3.
        'PASSWORD': '',                  # Not used with sqlite3.
        'HOST': '',                      # Set to empty string for localhost. Not used with sqlite3.
        'PORT': '',                      # Set to empty string for default. Not used with sqlite3.
    }
}

# Local time zone for this installation. Choices can be found here:
# [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_zones_by_name[/url]
# although not all choices may be available on all operating systems.
# On Unix systems, a value of None will cause Django to use the same
# timezone as the operating system.
# If running in a Windows environment this must be set to the same as your
# system time zone.
TIME_ZONE = 'America/Chicago'

# Language code for this installation. All choices can be found here:
# [url]http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/language-identifiers.html[/url]
LANGUAGE_CODE = 'en-us'

SITE_ID = 1

# If you set this to False, Django will make some optimizations so as not
# to load the internationalization machinery.
USE_I18N = True

# If you set this to False, Django will not format dates, numbers and
# calendars according to the current locale
USE_L10N = True

# Absolute path to the directory that holds media.
# Example: "/home/media/media.lawrence.com/"
MEDIA_ROOT = ''

# URL that handles the media served from MEDIA_ROOT. Make sure to use a
# trailing slash if there is a path component (optional in other cases).
# Examples: "http://media.lawrence.com", "http://example.com/media/"
MEDIA_URL = ''

# URL prefix for admin media -- CSS, JavaScript and images. Make sure to use a
# trailing slash.
# Examples: "http://foo.com/media/", "/media/".
ADMIN_MEDIA_PREFIX = '/media/'

# Make this unique, and don't share it with anybody.
SECRET_KEY = '*x=gsk2^=!sq(j-ahi$_4qh9)=@%pw!jx55rtd$5-n9i2z)f34'

# List of callables that know how to import templates from various sources.
TEMPLATE_LOADERS = (
    'django.template.loaders.filesystem.Loader',
    'django.template.loaders.app_directories.Loader',
#     'django.template.loaders.eggs.Loader',
)

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
)

ROOT_URLCONF = 'harlex.urls'

TEMPLATE_DIRS = (
    'C:/Work/Web development/harlex/templates',
)

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'django.contrib.messages',
    'django.contrib.admin',
)

[Blueridge]

Sorta off-topic(Didn't want to make another thread for this), but how would you be able to download Qbasic and get it to work on win7?

[aVoN]

[QUOTE=Pirate Ninja;24870026]While this is web code this show's how alot of comments be usefull for example in a config
(*snip*)
[/QUOTE]

Sure, in a config file. But in actual code it's dumb to comment every obvious step.

[Borsty]

Hmmmm... from reading some of your experiences with teachers..
I guess I had a lot of luck in all of my "programming" courses :P

We started with HTML (and yes, our teacher didn't call this programming, he taught us because it was the first course of IT that everyone had to take, and it was something that gave quick and visual results) and didn't complain if we used other languages to generate HTML code (some of us used asp.net, others used php or java servelets) and he was fine with it (actually gave those, including me, the best ratings)

We then moved on to doing maths and "scripting" in MS excel... took about 2 months till we moved on :P

Then we started with Pascal/Delphi (I still use it, I prefer it a lot over C++ tbh) And our assignments were stuff like asking the user for his age and telling him if he was 18+ or not, super simple calculators (input number, input operator, input number, input operator, ...) till solving classic puzzles (like the missionaries and cannibals problem).

In the 3rd course we were pretty much free on what to do, as long as it gave some useful results and we could explain how to achieve that (50% of the people actually had a basic understanding of Delphi then and wrote small tools or apps to control external stuff using the parallel port. One of us wrote an elevator simulation which was pretty interesting for that time, the others just gave up :P )

At university I got taught a lot about object oriented programming and it
's idioms. We learned these on the basis of Ruby and Java.
Seriously, once you worked on *bigger* projects where more than 10 people are involved with, your understanding and view on commenting code changes quite a bit.
Even *obvious* comments sometimes help to get other people understand what your intention was with this piece of code.

I learned the hard way what happens when a group of people that are responsible for a certain module doesn't see the need for comments and documentation..
Last semester we wrote a small construction and management simulation but at the end we couldn't see our effort in action because the people that were meant to do the visual part just gave us some classes where nobody had a clue on how to use it. The whole course got a *close to failed* rating thanks to those guys.

[b]TL:DR[/b] -> If you do something just for yourself and you're good at remembering what you wrote.. ignoring comments is absolutely fine.
Otherwise: Comment on every single line or expression that seems to need a comment or explanation.

[b]You can't write too much![/b] (Use common sense tho)

[i]If I just wrote bullshit.. please ignore it... It's 4:30 am and I'm drunk :V[/i]

[Shanethe13]

[QUOTE=Sevenx;24834856]In my computer science class we're learning Turing. But if someone is good enough they can switch to something else like C++ after the first few units[/QUOTE]

Ontario? I feel your pain. I had to do Turing a few years ago.

[Shrapnel :3]

At least you learnt programming, when I was entering secondary school I was pretty hyped about finally doing something with computers. It turns out that not one of our teachers can program and hence their ICT classes comprise of making spread sheets and publisher documents.

[Jawalt]

There's absolutely nothing wrong with QBASIC as a language, it does what they're using it for perfectly, teaches you a simple structured language.

[PvtCupcakes]

[QUOTE=Shrapnel :3;24892940]At least you learnt programming, when I was entering secondary school I was pretty hyped about finally doing something with computers. It turns out that not one of our teachers can program and hence their ICT classes comprise of making spread sheets and publisher documents.[/QUOTE]

That's how my high school was. I had to teach myself C from a really old book (1991), and I became the elitist prick in CS classes that I am now. Ever since I taught myself programming, I haven't been able to sit in a computer class and stop myself from picking apart everything the teacher says.

[TamTamJam]

[QUOTE=Darwin226;24841111]Yes there is actually.
[IMG]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/91/Amstrad_CPC464.jpg/800px-Amstrad_CPC464.jpg[/IMG]

Definitely not what he meant but you know...[/QUOTE]

That looks badass.