Original Post
First of all, I''m English and I''m a self taught programmer, but still willing to learn anything. Secondly, I love programming, I read anytyhing about it, literally anything. Thirdly, I was looking forward to coming to college to study Computing when I was in high school, but now I''m disheartened. I''ve been promised that it will improve at University, I hope so...
Why AS Computer “Science” sucks.
Choice of programming language:
Delphi, a language of virtually no industrial importance is the language of choice for people being taught how to program in my college year. Not only is Pascal, the language it is based on, the most ugly language ever to grace the earth with virtually no choice available to the programmer as to how he formats his code, but it is also one of the most annoying at the same time. The use of “units” in the Delphi language is of particular annoyance, even a unit that contains a type declaration with no adjoining type definition must still contain an empty implementation block. Of particular annoyance also is the size of the code of a Delphi program. Due to Pascal’s total lack of elegance, it favours huge keywords as opposed to far superior and more convenient symbols. The time wasted typing begin and end over and over where the same thing can be achieved with the saving of 7 keystrokes with C’s method of parentheses. Add the fact that Delphi’s syntax is somewhat illogical, a prime example being the illegality of the semicolon before the else statement in an “if…else” statement, and the use of the then and do keywords (I’d be obliged if someone could explain to me why they need to be included – what exactly do they do? Begin and end define the statement block, and if instantiates the “if” statement, so why include an extra keyword?)
As you can tell, I’m no particularly great fan of Pascal, or for that matter Delphi, and I fear that the reason it is used is to hide the student from any real programming, for example Delphi’s predefined pointer types and quite admirable standard library, preventing the student from ever defining his own pointer type, or even ever needing to write a bitmap loading routine himself. Only time will tell.
Singularity of programming languages:
We only learn Delphi. Even stranger, we only learn procedural Delphi. We spend no time on Delphi’s object oriented side, or for that matter ever look into other types of programming languages, for example logic and functional.
Use of IT in Computer Science lessons.
Let’s clear one thing up – Computer Science is the study of the algorithm at its most basic. However, when I enter a classroom to study Computer Science, why am I bombarded with lessons in how to use tripe such as Microsoft Access? Surely these are for people who study IT? An application should be picked up on the fly by the student (in a similar vein to us being left to fend for ourselves as to how to use Delphi’s debugger correctly and other advanced features it has). Surely the picking of a single database application and then the teaching of how to use it warrants no place in a Computer Science classroom?
The irrelevance showed the pointers:
Pointers are fundamental to such languages as C, C++ and Pascal Delphi. However, they seem to be brushed aside in theory lessons as nothing particularly special. We are taught pseudo code versions of an algorithm that tell us to use a pointer here and a pointer there – without ever actually getting taught what a pointer is! How this works I’m not sure.
Bias shown to Databases:
It feels like half of our year was spent talking about Databases, and then we even had to implement one for our practical. However, when Databases are being taught in such detail, and fundamental pillars of programming, such as pointers and file handling are not, then something is amiss.
Practical exam tripe:
Perhaps the single most annoying thing about the practical exam was the fact that people who chose to implement their design in VBA had the potential to get the same marks overall as people who coded theirs in Pascal. Basic has no place anywhere; it is a language that for some reason still hasn’t died out, perhaps due to Microsoft’s frenzied attempts at selling it to everyone, and including it in their Office products.
Secondly, we got points for including a “security system” in our application. In order to justify the examiner giving us these points, we simply needed to add a password box as the application started, with the password hard coded into the application itself. There was no encryption, ability to change passwords, security levels and so on, just a hard coded password that could be extracted from the program itself by even the lamest of crackers. What a gimmick.
Algorithms
First of all, we get taught algorithms in our theory lessons, and then never get any class time to implement them. This is perhaps the worst part. The pseudo code is given to the students without them actually having to think about how the algorithm could be implemented. This wouldn’t be so bad if the pseudo code was in such a high levelled language that it forced you to think for a second how to implement it, but the pseudo code is almost completely Pascal!
Secondly, the choice of algorithms to teach is appalling. As mentioned earlier, algorithms are fundamental to Computer Science yet as an example of a sorting algorithm we get taught the bubble sort – the slowest and least used one!
Rant over :-)
dMDI
"I don''''t know with what weapons the third world war will be fought, but I know the fourth will be fought with sticks and stones." Einstein
