Don't you hate it when...

[DukeofNukes]

a friend -- who knows you write code for money -- IMs you at 9:30 p.m. asking if you'll help him/her write a project for the Java class he/she is taking? Oh, yeah, at it's due in two hours? Oh, yeah, and he/she has written only the simplest of the three classes (the data container class) in the assignment? I know I hate it when that happens.

</rant>

[Strike]

hey, I wrote TWO of the three classes (the simplest two, but still ...)


just kidding ;-)

[kmj]

LOL; my friend would have to deal with some bad news, I'm afraid, because my friend would be failing that particular java assignment.

[DukeofNukes]

And that, my friend, is exactly what happened.

[Strike]

Originally posted by DukeofNukes
And that, my friend, is exactly what happened.

Good on you :) :tu:

[Dru Lee Parsec]

I hate it when people post their homework assignments to the Java Community Forum at Javasoft.com or to the Java Ranch Big Moose Saloon.

There was this one guy (at band camp) who cut and pasted the exact email his teacher sent out INCLUDING phrases like "You will want to read chapter 9 for a description of a Linked List".

LOOOOOOOOOO-SER

On these types of message boards you constantly see questions like "How would I make a class called Student that has attributes called 'Grade' and 'age'? And then how would I make another class called 'mathClass' that has something called a 'Collection' of my Student objects?"

Can they be more obvious that they're asking somebody to do their homework?

Or how about every Spring when the "Tower of Hanoi" questions start appearing? I always respond by asking them "So, What school are you taking your algorithms class at? Must be recursion week, Hmmm?"

The worse was when I was in school (enough years ago that the pain has almost gone away) and they kept putting us in group projects. NOBODY else in the group was competent enough to write a Hello World program and yet MY GRADE depended on these losers. So I'd have to write the entire project myself so we would pass the class.

Oh well. That's why some of us with C.S. degrees make our living writing code, and others people with C.S. degrees make their living pumping gas.

[DukeofNukes]

Fortunately, NC State is sufficiently paranoid about people cheating and stealing each other's code (as if anyone ever writes code professionally in isolation these days) that they refuse to consider group projects. That makes me happy.

[Dru Lee Parsec]

as if anyone ever writes code professionally in isolation these days

That is so true. ALthough right now I'm building a pretty major project mostly by myself and it's WONDERFUL.

However, from a "learn how to code" aspect working on your own in school makes sense. If they're trying to teach you how to work in the real world then group assignments still won't help. This is because when you get out of school you quickly realize that you know NOTHING about how to code in the real world.

I learned more about writing good code by working on code that senior developers had written than I've learned in all of high school and college together. It's still that way.

However, in school everyone sucks (That's ok though, Everyone has to start somewhere) so you really don't learn from group projects because there's no

But when these people come to you asking for help on their homework, and you realize that they have absolutly NO CLUE how to write the simplest piece of code, you really start to wonder "Why are they trying to get a C.S. degree if they're this incompetent"?

This brings up another point. I was just talking to a guy here at work about what makes a good coder. We realized that every programmer that we've ever respected started writing code as a hobby before they ever took classes. Every one of them wrote code for fun at one time (Of course, now we're all burned out old guys ;) )

I'm old enough to remember magazines that listed the source code for games. You would type in the code and compile it and you'd have a new computer game. There use to be all sorts of books out with source code for basic games. (basic in simplicity and BASIC as in the language). And if the version of BASIC in the magazine or book didn't match the BASIC you used on your comupter then you got very good at translating from one version of the language to another.

You just don't see those books any more. And there's nothing like the original BYTE magazine. You never see source code in a magazine any more.

Those were fun days. Back when you would write a game in BASIC that had to fit into less than 16k. Fun times, fun times indeed.

[Strike]

Originally posted by Dru Lee Parsec
You just don't see those books any more. And there's nothing like the original BYTE magazine. You never see source code in a magazine any more.
I guess I'm young enough to have an excuse not to have seen these magazines a great deal. Actually, my coding hobby started by hacking up existing games on the old Apple ][ by simply editing the code as is on the disk since it was all in AppleBASIC. But, I never really typed in much source from out of magazines.

However, there are still magazines with source listings. Take a look at just about any Linux Magazine and you will see some sort of Developer's Corner thing with source listings. I think you can usually download them from their site, but most of them are short enough that you could just as easily type it in as well.

[kmj]

Dr. Dobbs Journal has source listings.

[Dru Lee Parsec]

OK, yeah, there are mags with source code. But what I miss is the games listings. There you could see an entire program, code it in, and then play it.

[sachachua]

Groupwork in CS isn't really all that bad. Find the other geeks in your class and try as hard as you can to end up groupmates with them. Barring ego clashes (and irreconcilable differences like, say, Linux and Windows or Emacs and Vi), you should be able to work pretty well with geeks whose skills you also respect. If you can't find lots of geeks in your class, branch out - work with geeks in other batches. It helps to have a teacher who'll let you work on extra stuff and won't ask you to do Hello World again and again.

[Dru Lee Parsec]

Sachachua:

I wish it were that easy. I always seemed to get paired with people who couldn't code themselves out of a wet paper bag. Even when I tried to get good folks on my team I had the problem of everyone else knew who the "good ones" were and everyone fought for the same people.

On my senior project I had 2 women on my team who could barely speak english and couldn't code a "Hello World" program in C without checking a book first. The other guy on our team was a lazy SOB who didn't do ANY work at all for the first month. I wrote the entire project for us because we all got the same project grade. So if they failed I had to take up the slack or else MY grade would drop as well.

Here's the good news. In the years since I've graduated I havn't seen one of those people at any company I've worked at, or at any conference or advanced study class. So I guess the job market really does weed out the losers.

[stuka]

I've only been given group programming assignments twice - once in my 'Design Patterns' class, and again in my 'Concurrent Programming in Unix' class - and both times I was with competent folks. In fact, I sat last night and did almost-XP style pair programming with my project partner for the Unix class, and it was cool! Of course, he actually writes (Java) code for a living, and I'm teaching myself how to write real code (hopefully I'll get a real programming job eventually and learn in the field), so it wasn't nearly as bad as it could've been.

[travix]

Originally posted by Dru Lee Parsec
Or how about every Spring when the "Tower of Hanoi" questions start appearing? I always respond by asking them "So, What school are you taking your algorithms class at? Must be recursion week, Hmmm?"


i hated the tower of hanoi problem... i know how to do it, i just hate it though. ;)

[Danger Fan]

I'm working on 2 java projects this summer for classes. The first is a hash table, using various design methods. I have 1 partner for this, and I know him. We've been friends for a while. He's smart, and not lazy, so we are probably well ahead of where we should be that this point. I don't see us having a problem getting an A on the project.

On the other hand, I'm also working on a filesystem for another class. there are 4 of us in a group. We split the work up four ways. My friend who is in my group (who is very smart) took the really hard parts. I took the intermediate parts, and we gave the other 2 the easy parts. Well, me and my friend have been done for a while. The other 2 haven't started yet. The first part of the project is due monday. Me and my friend decided the other 2 are not gonna get it done, so we are picking up their slack so our grade doesn't suffer. However, we talked to the professor, and we fill out an evaluation of our group members at the end. This directly affects their grades. I guess 2 people aren't getting good grades this quarter.

[sicarius]

At the school I go to we cycle three month academic terms with three month work terms. I can't begin to describe how much better my code has gotten since comming here. Only one class I know of has any group assignment. It is a software engineering course where the group developes some application. I haven't taken it yet, but it sounds fun.

[Danger Fan]

Originally posted by sicarius
At the school I go to we cycle three month academic terms with three month work terms.

we do the same thing, although we have two 3 month terms and one 6 month term

[fish]

I much prefer the assignments style at my university, where almost any work you do outside of a test/exam situation isn't graded, its used strictly for feedback. The work in the assignment is then tested in an exam or a test.

Usually if the assignment is graded there is also an exam question on it - if you fail the exam question your assignment mark gets reduced to 0.

Its a pretty good motivator for you to do the work. If you slack off in a group assignment you pay for it individually and nobody else suffers, in fact, they get ahead from not having to carry dead weight :)

[Isengard]

Lots and lots of people wanted to copy my code when we were due to deliever something this year.
I`ve learned tons of java on my own, not just at school. I look at source code written by professionals, I`ve downloaded almost every .pdf file I can find on Java at Sun. I try to lear n from the code, not steal it, and it actually works. I love java, and I love programming. For me it is fun to read java docs, then coding it ( debugging it ;) ) and everything! Some people unforntunately doesn`t have the same interest.
I haven`t had much experience working as a coder. This summer I work at National Oilwell, coding in Matlab, java etc, and it`s cool! Got one year left of my bachelor degree, can`t wait to get to work :)