scott wrote:
>> But this has basically been my experience in every group project I've 
>> ever worked on. I've never met any other students who can actually 
>> program / do advanced math / comprehend complicated logic / etc. 
>> Basically I'm always the only guy in the group with any kind of 
>> technical skill.
> 
> Maybe you should have gone to a better University with more people at 
> your level?  I can't remember exactly how old you are, did you have to 
> go through the whole University application thingy where you supply your 
> predicted A-level grades and get made offers from different places?  DId 
> you choose somewhere that offered you really low grades or what?  You 
> seem to have been quite mismatched with the course.

Just for the record: I have never taken any A-levels. I only took 3 
GCSEs. I got a B and two Cs. This are unprecidentedly high grades for 
the school I went to. (Remember, I went to a school for mentally 
retarded people.)

I went to DeMontfort simply because it's the only university in the city 
of Milton Keynes. (Gotta love the way they shut down the year I 
graduated though! Apparently some folks had to transfer to some other 
random city to actually finish their courses...)

When I mentioned this to some guy in the local LUG, he goes "What? 
DeMontfort? That's not a university, it's an old polytechnic that 
*thinks* it's a university now." I have no idea what he's talking about 
- presumably some kind of cultural thing that would be over my head...

FWIW, my statements above were about college too. The class I was in 
contained a bunch of "lads" who were more interested in getting drunk 
and arguing about Cast vs Blur than actually learning stuff. Bunch of 
losers they were! I still remember the weekly paper fights. Oh, and the 
C'paddy races. (The objective being to say the word "c'paddy" the most 
times in 60 seconds.) Like, WTF?

> I think some people are just destined not to program, we had a 4x2 hour 
> time slot to do some C++ practical, which anyone who had ever made a 
> simple program with a few functions could have done easily in the first 
> 2 hours. Yet there were 1 or 2 people who were still there right at the 
> end struggling with the whole concept.

Yes. A lecturer once told me that grades for programming assignments 
show a curios bimodel distribution. There are people who "get it", and 
find the assignments ridiculously easy. They walk away with A-stars and 
better. And there are people who do not "get it". They struggly to write 
anything.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, during my entire degree I kept 
having random Asian people come up to me and beg me to "fix" their 
programs. Quite how they knew my name is beyond me...

Just once, I did in fact take a look at one guy's Java program. Except 
that... it wasn't Java. It had Java keywords in it, and the syntax was 
sort-of reminiscent of Java. But it was gibberish. COMPLETE GIBBERISH. I 
couldn't even take a wild guess at what it was *supposed* to do! The guy 
claimed he just needed me to make "a few small fixes" - but this text 
file was quite clearly not removely compilable, never mind runnable.

Clearly, the only way to "fix" this code would begin with deleting all 
the currently existing code.

I am unsure as to whether the guy in question was so clueless that he 
honestly believed that it wouldn't take much to fix this, or whether he 
was just trying to sweet-talk me. How the HELL he expected the person 
marking the work to believe that he wrote it is beyond me - unless he 
really did think he had it almost right to start with...

Seriously. What. The. Hell.

But it seems that to some people, Java is just words on a page. Only a 
few people can see beyond that and comprehend the conceptual constructs 
that those words denote.

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