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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On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:46:05 +0200, Fredrik Eriksson wrote:

> On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:41:14 +0200, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>>> http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.abs.php#58508
>>
>>   Why do I seem to be the only one who is not getting a page with such
>> an anchor in it? I even checked all the anchors in that page, and that
>> one does not appear. The closest ones are #55694 and #58653.
> 
> I get the same, though one of the comments that do exist is apparently
> in reply to #58508. I presume it was simply deleted.

It was there last night, and dated 2005, so would be very surprised if it 
was deleted.

<pulls up link>

Indeed, the post is now gone.  It was posted by user "concordia" and the 
basic idea was that they were proposing an inverse to the abs() function 
using a bizzare formula.

Try:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080117205423/http://us.php.net/manual/en/
function.abs.php#58508

It's not formatted nicely, but the original post is there.

Jim

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scott wrote:
> My favourite is the parametric equation we give and ask them to 
> calculate the area under the curve between two limits.

Heh. I don't even go that far. I just have a bunch of questions like "why do 
they call it raytracing" and "what's the difference between a deterministic 
and a non-deterministic state machine" and "what causes a SIG_SEGV" and 
"what's the difference between an inner join and an outer join" and "what's 
an advantage of UTF-8 over other encoding schemes" and "what does a 
translation look-aside buffer translate".

If you can't get at least a handful of such questions right from outside the 
field you're applying for, I know you're inexperienced, unschooled, or 
uninterested/incapable of expanding your responsibilities.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

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Fredrik Eriksson wrote:
> I get the same, though one of the comments that do exist is apparently 
> in reply to #58508. I presume it was simply deleted.

I guess concordia heard everyone was making fun of him/her, so deleted the 
comment.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Heh. I don't even go that far. I just have a bunch of questions like "why do 
> they call it raytracing" and "what's the difference between a deterministic 
> and a non-deterministic state machine" and "what causes a SIG_SEGV" and 
> "what's the difference between an inner join and an outer join" and "what's 
> an advantage of UTF-8 over other encoding schemes" and "what does a 
> translation look-aside buffer translate".

> If you can't get at least a handful of such questions right from outside the 
> field you're applying for, I know you're inexperienced, unschooled, or 
> uninterested/incapable of expanding your responsibilities.

  If I ever have to come up with job interview questions, I'll keep in mind
that principle. It sounds very sensible to me.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:53:36 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Fredrik Eriksson wrote:
>> I get the same, though one of the comments that do exist is apparently
>> in reply to #58508. I presume it was simply deleted.
> 
> I guess concordia heard everyone was making fun of him/her, so deleted
> the comment.

After 4 years....that's what surprised me.

Fortunately, it's difficult to remove all traces from the 'net, 
especially after that amount of time has passed. ;-)

Jim

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clipka wrote:
> Warp schrieb:
>>   Why do I seem to be the only one who is not getting a page with such
>> an anchor in it? I even checked all the anchors in that page, and that
>> one does not appear. The closest ones are #55694 and #58653.
> 
> Because, apparently, someone did the only sane thing, and removed that
> post.

But you can continue discussing this instead:

http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5404590

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Nicolas Alvarez schrieb:
> http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5404590

Somehow I /think/ I recall having actually used

     LET x = 0-x

back in the old BASIC days. I think that's as bad as it ever got.

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Warp wrote:
>   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.
> 

I will admit to having done some absurd things like that in introduction
to programming classes. Not for having forgotten how to solve the
problem, but for the challenge of finding a very bad design and the look
on teaching assistants faces when they have to read the code and offer
feedback.

There were very strict rules about what was good and bad design, and how
to handle commenting the code, so skirting those was just a way to be
creative.

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Sabrina Kilian <ski### [at] vtedu> wrote:
> I will admit to having done some absurd things like that in introduction
> to programming classes. Not for having forgotten how to solve the
> problem, but for the challenge of finding a very bad design and the look
> on teaching assistants faces when they have to read the code and offer
> feedback.

That's cold.  I had a friend who used the entire McDonalds value menu for
variable names.  Or I think I brought this up before, but I knew someone
learning c who programmed a sudoku solver and stored the whole thing in binary,
only the binary numbers were in decimal (e.g. 110110010.999999).  It involved a
lot of logarithms and powers of ten.

 - Ricky

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