TDD is BS?

Nick Sabalausky SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com
Wed Jun 26 13:24:27 PDT 2013


On Fri, 21 Jun 2013 16:03:57 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 06:12:57PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > - Many of the professors are terrible programmers themselves. For
> >   example, I had one who openly admitted the only language he knew
> > was C, and yet at one point it became painfully obvious that he had
> >   almost no comprehension of null-terminated strings.
> 
> That's the beef I have with over-emphasis on CS theory. There's
> nothing wrong with theory in and of itself -- in fact it's
> foundational and very much indispensible -- but when you become so
> detached from reality that you think in terms of pure idealizations
> -- when you can *only* think in terms of pure idealizations -- that
> you can't even write a single line of real code without some external
> help, then something has clearly gone very, very wrong.
> 

Yea. I'm convinced that the theory and the practical are both
critically important. Either one is only minimally useful without the
other.

> 
> > - Many of the teachers don't even teach, they just collect the
> >   thousands of dollars in tuition and give you a book recommendation
> >   (really more of a "demand" than a recommendation).
> 
> That's because the incentives are all wrong. Professors aren't paid to
> teach; they're paid to produce research. Publish or perish, so goes
> the saying in those circles. To them, teaching is an additional burden
> imposed upon them that they'd rather get over with ASAP and get back
> to their research, whatever it takes. Turn away the students showing
> up at your office hours. Bore them to death in class so they wouldn't
> know *what* to ask even if they wanted to. Read from a photocopy of
> the textbook word-for-word to pass lecture time with zero effort (I've
> actually been in a class where this was done). Anything, to get it
> over with and get back to the work that pays.
> 

That's a good point. Although it doesn't help that (from what I've
seen) the students are given basically no indication ever that the
profs are there for anything other than teaching. As far as the
"school" ever indicates to the students, it's a "school" rather than an
R&D lab. And that's a natural conclusion for the student to make when
they're forking out $100k for an alleged "education".

> Some of my best teachers in university were part-time lecturers, one
> of whom won several teaching awards and accolades for 3 years
> straight. I don't know if there's even one faculty member that ever
> got *one* teaching award.

You know, I honestly noticed the same thing. I always thought it
was...interesting...in college that the best teachers I had were almost exclusively the part-timers, and vice versa.

> (On the contrary, a certain faculty member
> was so arrogant of his tenurehood that he'd show up on evaluation day
> and tell students to their face that they can write whatever they
> want and it wouldn't affect him in the least, 'cos his tenure meant
> he can never be fired. And of course, he consistently gets
> rock-bottom reviews from students, and incoming students are
> consistently warned by said students to avoid his courses at all
> costs.)
> 

Tenure is a concept I've *always* despised. May as well just hand out
Royalty status to people. It ends up the pretty much the same way.

> 
> >   Now, I'm a strong believer in being self-taught and learning from
> >   books, but all I need for that is a library card, not a $100k debt
> >   and four years of elitist attitudes from people who clearly don't
> >   know what they're doing anyway.
> 
> Heh. Nearly all of my programming skills are self-taught (well, and
> learned from experience now that I have some number of years in the
> industry), but I'm no reader either. I was doing online learning long
> before the 'Net became cool,

Actually, my first introduction to programming was the interactive
tutorial disks that came with the Apple IIc. I sometimes find it kind
of depressing that instruction isn't even *that* far along anymore, let
alone any further advanced.

> and every now and then I still browse
> around learning new algorithms and stuff, while everybody else is
> clicking their lives away on FB and twitter (no offense, Andrei, but I
> do think FB is an evil waste of time, at least when it comes to the
> way most people use it).
> 

My biggest issues with FB/Twit are that:

A. They degenerate the internet into proprietary walled-gardens (it's
internet w/ orwellian training wheels, or a Dvorak put it: It's "New
AOL")

B. They've managed to turn every product and advertisement, ever, into
their *own* advertisement with the "f" and "t" plastered everywhere you
look. I even have a granola bar sitting here with FB's and Twit's
advertising plastered on the wrapper, for fuck's sake. I wouldn't mind
the twitfaces so much if I were able to opt-out of their constant
bombardment from every fucking facet of society.

But yea, the fact that, for the most part, they ultimately amount to
LiveJournal anyway (itself an abomination of pointless self-indulgent
minutia and drivel) doesn't help matters.



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