William Deakin wrote:
> Also, could you please refrain from ageism. Its tough enough being
> young, old, or any other age without fud spread about you.
I didn't want to do that. I have here much to struggle with habits
or laws who don't care at all about young people. On the other hand
I think that my classes after the course should know more than
before. So it's not only fun. But most students want to be prepared
for profession, and if we had better laboratories and a better
organisation they would collaborate with application.
In some of the disputes we had here, I felt a certain one-sidedness.
There are often different ways to do the same things well, especially
in different situations.
Who posts to the list cannot always explain these situations. So general
discussions that start from a single line can sometimes go fruitlessly
in a completely wrong direction.
je
Josef Eschgfaeller wrote:
> In some of the disputes we had here, I felt a certain one-sidedness.
> There are often different ways to do the same things well, especially
> in different situations.
>
> Who posts to the list cannot always explain these situations. So general
> discussions that start from a single line can sometimes go fruitlessly
> in a completely wrong direction.
>
> je
I cannot do anything else but agree. Unfortunately you hit one of my
bugbears.
Best Regards,
Will
Josef Eschgfaeller <···@felix.unife.it> writes:
> William Deakin wrote:
>
> I didn't want to do that. I have here much to struggle with habits
> or laws who don't care at all about young people. On the other hand
> I think that my classes after the course should know more than
> before. So it's not only fun. But most students want to be prepared
> for profession, and if we had better laboratories and a better
> organisation they would collaborate with application.
>
> In some of the disputes we had here, I felt a certain one-sidedness.
> There are often different ways to do the same things well, especially
> in different situations.
>
These two paragraphs are kind of interesting, because one of the first
things a student is going to discover working in a professional
environment is that they're going to be *told* how to do various
things, like (for instance) indent their code, and they will (with
luck!) be told to do it the standard way. And if they don't do that,
people will get very cross with them. This might seem draconian, but
on multi-person projects it does actually matter a fair amount: it's
really important that people can read each other's code, and it's also
very important that people do not gratuitously reformat things in ways
which will cause diffs to blow up and thus obfuscate real changes
behind a mass of reformatting.
Which makes it all the more important, in my opinion, to teach a
reasonably standard style. This is not the only example of Lisp being
taught in what I find a gratuitously weird style that I've seen:
perhaps this is because Lisp is normally taught in a very heavily
purist-academic environment where people have little concern for
boring engineering concerns.
When I've taught Lisp I've always tried to push really the opposite
attitude & stress engineering concerns -- perhaps that's why I'm not
in academia any more (:-).
--tim
Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> ... one of the first things a student is going to discover working in a
> professional
> environment is that they're going to be *told* how to do various things,
> like (for instance) indent their code, and they will (with luck!) be told
> to do it the standard way.
As one of your students I would say you did this. And you did this well. I
particularly liked the way you explained what standard formatting was and
why it was used. I recently had problems looking at some source that wasn't
formatted according to the standard and it was a nightmare. Particularly
when some of it was in UPPER CASE also. Ouch.
> And if they don't do that, people will get very cross with them. This
> might seem draconian, but on multi-person projects it does actually
> matter a fair amount: it's really important that people can read each
> other's code, ...
In the last two days I have spent over a quarter of my time arguing about
coding standards in which indenting and bracket alignment, along with the
use of comments caused much discussion (this was a discussion primarily
looking at C/C++/perl/SQL/PL:SQL). And yes, me and my collegues did get
very cross with each other.
> ... and it's also very important that people do not gratuitously reformat
> things in ways which will cause diffs to blow up and thus obfuscate real
> changes behind a mass of reformatting.
Guilty m'lord. I am hated for my reformatting of code. More hated for this
than most of my other irritating habits ... However, I only sort of agree
with this point, it is possible to get diff to ignore changes in files due
to reformatting through changes to white-space or alignment of brackets. Or
by running code through a standard formatter so that code checked in and
out of source control is formatted according to a standard. But this is
probably me just being smart. And nobody like a smart-ass ...
> Which makes it all the more important, in my opinion, to teach a
> reasonably standard style. This is not the only example of Lisp being
> taught in what I find a gratuitously weird style that I've seen:
> perhaps this is because Lisp is normally taught in a very heavily
> purist-academic environment where people have little concern for boring
> engineering concerns.
>
> When I've taught Lisp I've always tried to push really the opposite
> attitude & stress engineering concerns -- perhaps that's why I'm not in
> academia any more (:-).
>
> --tim
I think you suceeded in your aims. But that maybe because you care about
teaching. However, I still think Josef may have a point. I can think an
undergraduate Fortran courses that I took in which the emphasis was heavily
place on learning formatting and 'the standard style' and not on trying to
get to grips with programming or the language.
I didn't mean to get up tim's nose :-) What do I know? I'm no expert, I'm
an ex-Physics academic-wannabie who mungs a bit of code from time to time.
But it keeps the wolf from the door.
Best Regards,
Will
* Josef Eschgfaeller <···@felix.unife.it>
| In some of the disputes we had here, I felt a certain one-sidedness.
| There are often different ways to do the same things well, especially
| in different situations.
just because someone knows that something is not right, doesn't mean
there is something else that is the only right thing. it is further
possible to know what is bad without knowing what the best solution is.
I continue to be baffled by your lack of insight into basic logic.
#:Erik
--
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century
On 1999-07-02 14:19 +0000,
Josef Eschgfaeller wrote:
[...]
> So general
> discussions that start from a single line can sometimes go fruitlessly
> in a completely wrong direction.
Given that `the best laid plans o' men and mice gang aft a'gley,'
can one expect Usenet to do better?
Vassil Nikolov
Permanent forwarding e-mail: ········@poboxes.com
For more: http://www.poboxes.com/vnikolov
Abaci lignei --- programmatici ferrei.