🚀 go-pugleaf

Marni Tuttle wrote:
> 
> Paul Moeller (pmoeller@ra.isisnet.com) wrote:
> : >     How do you adequately transport students from one HUGE campus, to
> : >another campus downtown in the 10 minutes we have for class changes?
> 
> : I attended a very large university in the U.S. that held classes in a
> : number of "satellite" campuses that were kms from the main campuse.
> : The attitude of university admin was that it was entirely the students
> : responsibility to get to those campuses.
> 
>         Doesn't seem like an ideal situation to me... Particularly awkward
> for those of us who are involved in two extremely different degrees.  So why
> would our universities plan such a thing on purpose?  Why would they
> discourage students from pursuing both their interests when it is to the
> benefit of everyone one involved that students become multi faceted and
> talented individuals?
> 
> --
> Marni Tuttle | tuttle@ug.cs.dal.ca | Look! http://www.ug.cs.dal.ca/~tuttle/
> '95/96 President of DSCSS | Dal Grad '96 | BA English | BSc Computing Science
> All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors. - Unknown

Whine, whine, whine. Do you really think 'our universities planned such 
a thing on purpose'? Isn't our thinking a bit conspiracist? I understand 
that it is the job of the latest/greatest generation to question 
everything, but really -- your assertion is pretty goofy.

Since you're chasing a BS in computer science, I'll take the leap and 
guess that you're considering going into an area where skills as a logic 
diagnostician will come in handy. If so, consider that a great many 
programming snafus (most?) are caused by too much code, not too little. 
This introduction of type of bug is symptomatic of an inexperienced 
programmer who piles up code until a function seems to work. This 
example may be used as a metaphor for my argument: that it's easy to 
jump to wild conclusions when too many factors are considered without 
comparative weighing. If an idea is too complicated, requires untested 
assumptions, or if it just doesn't pass the giggle test, it's goofy. A 
good logic diagnostician can step away from what's obvious and see where 
an undesireable tangent was branched off from the main goal.

I don't know if the snafu axiom I described is always true, and I 
certainly don't have any hard measurements to indicate that it is. 
Whether it's true or not in the artificial universe of academia is 
beyond my experience since I'm self-taught. Nonetheless, 15 years of 
professional programming has shown me that a) many bugs in PC-based 
development (Windows, network, database...) are caused by too much code, 
usually written by someone who isn't really sure what they're doing, and 
b) most universities do a deplorable job of preparing their charges with 
the skills necessary to hit the ground running and be even moderately 
productive in a commercial programming environment.

Moral? Lighten up, simplify, and be prepared to unlearn a lot of that 
BSCS when you get a job.

Jeepers. Preachy, preachy, preachy.

-- 

- Brian Ebarb