[OT] destroy all software (was Programming language WATs)

[Chad J]

On 01/20/2012 10:48 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Saturday, 21 January 2012 at 03:43:50 UTC, Caligo wrote:
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZtX32sKVE
>
> Oh my, don't get me started on college!
>
> I'm so happy I dropped out of that waste.

Yeah, I like the qualifications that Paulo and Jonathan add to this.

My current job would have been unreachable without a college degree. 
Was it worth it?  Yes.  Would it have been worth it if I had to burden 
the ENTIRE cost of college on my student loans?  No, probably not.  I 
had a lot of help from parents on this, and some grants.

I pay about $400 a mo. in student loans.  Annoying, but not bad if 
you're living on the cheap in Ohio.

I also took a Physics degree instead of a CS degree.

I don't think American colleges teach Computer Science/Engineering very 
well at all.  My physics degree was an Engineering Physics degree and 
thus had an engineering "emphasis" which I filled with some CS courses, 
mostly because they'd bring up my grades after the physics classes.  A 
few of them were pretty legit, but then OSU insisted on teaching this 
RESOLVE stuff.  Now, I'm not going to make the argument that it's bad 
because no one uses that in the workplace.  I'm down with using an 
obscure programming language for pedagogy as long as there is a reason. 
  But what RESOLVE is... they want it to be reusable code, but obviously 
they don't take DRY seriously, because they make you duplicate code all 
over the place.  Duplicate code is not reusable or maintainable.  That 
is my biggest complaint with it, and it soured my opinion of the whole 
thing for the entire time.  Oh, and they also liked to invent 
terminology for things that already had prior terminology, which is 
dumb.  There are more complaints, but I'll stop there.

Right.  So I took a physics degree.  The physics part actually seemed 
very legit.  Physics profs tend to know their shit.  I actually have a 
lot of respect for that side of things.  I think I gained a lot from the 
Physics classes in terms of rigorous thinking and problem solving 
abilities.  That's the stuff that allows me to tackle /hard/ problems, 
and in any field.

I also took a game development class.  Took it twice.  It was pegged at 
grad-level.  And it really was /development/; you were expected to be an 
expert in some field before signing on and teaming up.  It was all about 
teaching people how to collaborate on these things and deal with the 
large amount of detail work that goes into games.  I think I learned a 
lot about how to manage such projects from doing that class.  But more 
importantly, I think it helped me build my self-identity.  It taught me 
that I really do enjoy this game development stuff, even though there 
are some hard and shitty parts to it.  I am OK with that, and still 
enjoy it for all of the novel challenges and cool experiences.

So college wasn't all that bad to me.  They still need to change the 
funding model here in the states though.  That shit is broken as fuck. 
For some people, namely those that are talented and have good 
self-motivation, it may very well be worth their while to skip that 
mess.  Probably doesn't work for physics though; it can be hard to do 
experimental physics on your own ;)

Also, the D newsgroup is probably better at teaching programming than 
college.  Hmmmmm.  ;)