[OT] Re: Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 11 June 2016 at 12:19:52 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> LOL. 10x that would be cheap in the US, and I don't think that 
> your average school will let folks sit in on courses (though 
> some will). For your average college in the US, I would only 
> expect anyone to take classes if they're actually working 
> towards a degree, though I'm sure that there are exceptions in 
> some places.

I remember that we sometimes had older programmers taking some 
courses, maybe to ge a degree? But not often. The $100/semester 
fee isn't for tuition though, it is for student 
activities/facilities, paper copies etc. Tuition is free.

> It works better when the school itself is really hard to get 
> into. For instance, my dad went to MIT, and according to him, 
> you usually don't have much of a need for weeder courses there, 
> because it was already hard enough to get into the school that 
> folks who can't hack it won't even be there - and it's an 
> engineering school, so you're typically going to get very 
> smart, well-prepared students who want to do engineering.

It sorts itself out at higher levels, although I once had a 
project group at the master level that came to the hallway 
outside my office to get help, and it eventually dawned on me 
that none of the three boys knew that they should end sentences 
with ";"... I couldn't help laughing... and I kinda felt bad 
about it, but they laughed too, so I guess it was ok. I was so 
totally unprepared for that kind of problem at a master level 
course. I assume they came from some other field, as it was a 
web-oriented course.

These things with uneven knowledge levels are more of a problem 
in "hip" project oriented courses, not so much in the courses 
that are proper compsci and are based on individual final exams. 
It kinda work out ok as long as students of the same level go on 
the same group, but it creates a lot of friction if you get a 
mixed group where the better students feel the other ones are 
freeloaders.

> You freqeuntly either end up with the school trying to weed out 
> a lot of folks up front by having very hard beginning courses 
> or making their beginning classes easy in an attempt to make it 
> so that everyone has a chance, though I think that tends to 
> just delay the inevitable for many students.

Yep, exactly, but the problem was that the introduction course in 
programming was required by other fields such as getting a master 
in bio-chemistry or so. That didn't go very well when the 
lecturer once came up with a "clever exam" where you got stuck if 
you didn't master the first task. So 40% failed on their final 
exam, 200 angry students? That would've made me feel bad. After 
that they softened the tasks a bit... making failure harder.

In the math department they had one more narrow calculus course 
for those who wanted to specialise in math and a broader more 
pragmatic calculus course for those who were more to use math as 
an applied tool in other fields. Probably a better solution.

> to be able to program. So, I agree that it would be nice if 
> there were some sort of aptitude test up front that at least 
> indicated whether you were likely have a very hard time with 
> programming. But I don't think that I've ever heard of any 
> schools doing anything like that (though obviously, some could 
> be, and I just haven't heard of it). And I don't know how you 
> would even go about making such a test, though I expect that 
> there are computer science professors out there who would.

Well, I don't know.  I guess having average or above in math 
would work out. Not that you have to know math, but general 
problem solving. I noticed that people from other fields that was 
working on their master picked up programming faster, perhaps 
because they had acquired skills in structuring and problem 
solving.

Then again, pure theoretical topics kill motivation for me. Like, 
I could never find any interest in solving tricky integrals 
analytically as it seemed like a pointless exercise. And to be 
honest, I've never found the need to do it. But as you said, some 
topics become more meaningful later in life and I'd probably put 
more energy into topics like program verification and 
combinatorics today than I did in my youth.