🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <01bd56de$8a739140$8ce6abc3@daylieen>, Elim Garak
<laf@coventry.ac.uk> writes
>> Pedt Scragg   wrote                 <newsmaster@pedt.demon.co.uk>
>
>> So you were encouraged to turn in something different than the assignment
>that
>> you *should* have been doing ?  Hey that's easy. Copy any source code in
>the
>> relevant language from somewhere, remove any copyright notices and turn
>it in.
>> 
>> Come off it, no genuine classes would work like that. 
>
>Not difference to the point of irrelevancy, but significantly beyond what
>was required.  For instance my very first assignment as simple electricity
>bill converter.  In order to pass we simply had to write a program that
>would wok out the values.  My program however would do all this in a
>graphical environment ( very primitive I'll admit but I'd only been
>programming for a couple of weeks) with records saved to disk, it would
>produce little graphs showing how your bills had changed over time and
>print it all out.  It was this kind of thing that was encouraged and
>frequently delivered.
>

OK, the good news, I allways ask students to explore interesting ways to
learn about their design/implementation skills. This often means doing
graphics and making games.  ALL the students who do this end up learning
more than the ones who stick rigidly to the syllabus!

I think this is mainly because only the better programers actually enjoy
it so thay are the ones who make the effort to 'go further'

Now the bad news 

If I have set an assignment, any student of mine who fails to meet the
specification exactly is marked DOWN.  An assignment is carefully
designed to test a students knowlege of specific areas, I do not like
being asked to wade through acres of well scripted but irrelevant code
to find the bits I want! 


Imagine the bill converter was for a client, ME, and I agreed to pay you
$10,000 for the job specified.

When you deliver, I give you $5,000  You complain that your program is
worth $10,000.  I say if what you did the whole thing for the $10,000
then the bit I asked for cannot be worth that much.  I hope the logic
does not escape you.

Do not stop enjoying programing, I still get a buzz from an elegant
algorithm although in the commercial world, I admit that time
constraints and Dynamic program specs were a pain in the neck  ;)

Cheers, Jim

remove s from swandana to email reply

Jim Barr        Machine Conversation
                Best is the enemy of good enough
                Leaves rustle,   blades turn,    water moves

Barrs Law of Recursive futility:---
        If you are smart enough to use one of these.....
                       .....you can probably manage without one!