Warp wrote:

>   Having been a teaching assistant that the University of Technology here,
> in a course where several tasks are programming-related, you wouldn't
> believe the programming horrors I have had to witness.

As a student, you wouldn't believe the bad advice I've seen.

The guy who was supposed to be teaching us Java once asked somebody else 
to take one of his classes. "But I don't know Java!" the man complained. 
"Oh, that's easy" he says. "If they say the program doesn't work, just 
tell them they missed a semicolon somewhere. And if that doesn't fix it, 
tell them they missed a close-bracket somwhere. And if that still 
doesn't work, tell them 'I think you need to fundamentally rethink the 
design of your application'."

...and people wonder why some folks can't program for toffee. (Although, 
in fairness, those syntax glitches are the most common show-stoppers.)

Then again, our Java lecturer was rubbish. It was he to tried to tell me 
that 2^64 was "more than the number of atoms in the universe". (A quick 
query to Wolfram Alpha show's that it's actually a mere 1% of all the 
grains of sand on *our* planet, never mind the entire universe...) This 
is the guy who published a Java book with had several pages of negative 
feedback up Amazone for the examples which didn't compile, and the 
grammatical and spelling errors.

A bit of a twat, really. But hey, what do you pay tens of thousands of 
pounds in tuition fees for?

>   For example, you wouldn't believe how complicated the task of writing
> a function which calculates the distance between two 2D points can get.
> Where normal people would just write a "sqrt(vx*vx+vy*vy)"-based solution
> in 3 lines (two of them to calculate vx and vy), the worst examples I saw
> spawned over 100 lines of code. And I'm not exaggerating the least bit here.
> And these are university students who have gone through math courses in
> grade school, high school and several years in the university.

OK, that's quite scary, actually. o_O

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