My programming teacher is a freaking degenerate. He spend 7 months teaching us basic stuff like if-clauses, while-loops and stuff like that over and over again - everyone was annoyed but he didn't listen to us because "some people still don't get it". (The reason for this could be their total absence during lessons but who am I to tell.)
Beginning of 2018 he realised we hadn't much time left to prepare for our final exam so he tried self-taught learning. 8 sorting algorithms, recursion, how to write classes and objects in less than a week. And of course there was a classtest about this - needless to say that like nobody passed it. He still has no clue why we are "so lazy and dumb".
One of his favourite code examples is a calculator. I don't know how many i've programmed and they've gotten more and more ridiculous. (Who the hell would want interfaces like IComparer in a calculator?)
He even wanted to convince us that for-loops can't count down (and that things like "i--" doen't exist.)
I could go on and on about this guy and his craziness.

Sorting algorithms visualized

Four semesters in. As a class we’ve learned Java, SQL, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, C++, C#, and a small amount of PHP

We’ve built databases, websites, apps for phone and desktop, and we’ve toyed with game development in unity

We’ve used multiple IDE’s with differing pros and cons, virtual machines, server development stacks (XAMPP), data structures, and we’ve used multiple sorting algorithms to learn their differences.

Some things on here are immensely more difficult than others. If at 4 semesters in you still don’t know how to AT LEAST google your issues for 10 minutes or even READ THE DAMN BOOK, then please don’t bother asking TA’s for help we have our own assignments to do and can’t afford spend an hour working with you to fix your code while you just ignore our suggestions

Four semesters in you should know where to find help online and if that doesn’t work, how to ask for and accept help. If you can’t then I’m sorry. I’m going to spend my time helping others, before I waste my time trying to help you

Not having finished any education, and writing code during interviews.

I have a pretty nice resume with good references, and I think I'm a reasonably good & experienced dev.

But I'm absolutely unable to write code on paper, and really wonder how some devs can just write out algorithms using a pen and reason about it, without trying/failing/playing/fixing in an IDE.

Education I think.

I can transform the theory on a complex Wikipedia page about math/algorithm into code, I can translate a Haskell library into idiomatic python... but what I haven't done is write out sorting functions or fibonacci generators a million times during Java class.

I don't see the point either... but I still feel utterly worthless during an interview if they ask "So you haven't even finished highschool? Can you at least solve this prime number problem using a marker on this whiteboard? Could you explain in words which sorting algorithm is faster and why?"

"Uh... let me fetch a laptop with an IDE, stackoverflow and Wikipedia?"

My favorite sorting algorithm.

We all make Blue Prism the receving end of our jokes and that's actually very unfair, they even developed their own sorting algorithms, fuckYouSort, and that's something I want to acknowledge.

I hate when theres simple problems I cant solve. Legit pisses me off. I cant even program a simple number sorting algorithm. 🤬

Major rant incoming. Before I start ranting I’ll say that I totally respect my professor’s past. He worked on some really impressive major developments for the military and other companies a long time ago. Was made an engineering fellow at Raytheon for some GPS software he developed (or lead a team on I should say) and ended up dropping fellowship because of his health. But I’m FUCKING sick of it. So fucking fed up with my professor. This class is “Data Structures in C++” and keep in mind that I’ve been programming in C++ for almost 10 years with it being my primary and first language in OOP.

Throughout this entire class, the teacher has been making huge mistakes by saying things that aren’t right or just simply not knowing how to teach such as telling the students that “int& varOne = varTwo” was an address getting put into a variable until I corrected him about it being a reference and he proceeded to skip all reference slides or steps through sorting algorithms that are wrong or he doesn’t remember how to do it and saying, “So then it gets to this part and....it uh....does that and gets this value and so that’s how you do it *doesnt do rest of it and skips slide*”.

First presentation I did on doubly linked lists. I decided to go above and beyond and write my own code that had a menu to add, insert at position n, delete, print, etc for a doubly linked list. When I go to pull out my code he tells me that I didn’t say anything about a doubly linked list’s tail and head nodes each have a pointer pointing to null and so I was getting docked points. I told him I did actually say it and another classmate spoke up and said “Ya” and he cuts off saying, “No you didn’t”. To which I started to say I’ll show you my slides but he cut me off mid sentence and just yelled, “Nope!”. He docked me 20% and gave me a B- because of that. I had 1 slide where I had a bullet point mentioning it and 2 slides with visual models showing that the head node’s previousNode* and the tail node’s nextNode* pointed to null.

Another classmate that’s never coded in his life had screenshots of code from online (literally all his slides were a screenshot of the next part of code until it finished implementing a binary search tree) and literally read the code line by line, “class node, node pointer node, ......for int i equals zero, i is less than tree dot length er length of tree that is, um i plus plus.....”
Professor yelled at him like 4 times about reading directly from slide and not saying what the code does and he would reply with, “Yes sir” and then continue to read again because there was nothing else he could do.

Ya, he got the same grade as me.

Today I had my second and final presentation. I did it on “Separate Chaining”, a hashing collision resolution. This time I said fuck writing my own code, he didn’t give two shits last time when everyone else just screenshot online example code but me so I decided I’d focus on the PowerPoint and amp it up with animations on models I made with the shapes in PowerPoint. Get 2 slides in and he goes,
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide.
Me: Uh alright, *click*
(Slide showing the 3 collision resolutions: Open Addressing, Separate Chaining, and Re-Hashing)
Prof: Aren’t you forgetting something?
Me: ....Not that I know of sir
Prof: I see Open addressing, also called Open Hashing, but where’s Closed Hashing?
Me: I believe that’s what Seperate Chaining is sir
Prof: No
Me: I’m pretty sure it is
*Class nods and agrees*
Prof: Oh never mind, I didn’t see it right

Get another 4 slides in before:
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide
Me: .......alright *click*
(Professor loses train of thought? Doesn’t mention anything about this slide)
Prof: I er....um, I don’t understand why you decided not to mention the other, er, other types of Chaining. I thought you were going to back on that slide with all the squares (model of hash table with animations moving things around to visualize inserting a value with a collision that I spent hours on) but you didn’t.
(I haven’t finished the second half of my presentation yet you fuck! What if I had it there?)
Me: I never saw anything on any other types of Chaining professor
Prof: I’m pretty sure there’s one that I think combines Open Addressing and Separate Chaining
Me: That doesn’t make sense sir. *explanation why* I did a lot of research and I never saw any other.
Prof: There are, you should have included them.
(I check after I finish. Google comes up with no other Chaining collision resolution)

He docks me 20% and gives me a B- AGAIN! Both presentation grades have feedback saying, “MrCush, I won’t go into the issues we discussed but overall not bad”.

Thanks for being so specific on a whole 20% deduction prick! Oh wait, is it because you don’t have specifics?
Bye 3.8 GPA

Is it me or does he have something against me?

Somebody ranted about his teacher showing windows presentation and teaching nothing. I wanted to comment that post but i have enough material to make the whole rant out of it.

Well at least you have those presentations! In my school we have 2 IT classrooms one with win xp, 1ghz cpu, 0,5gb ram computers and one with win vista, 2 core 2ghz cpu and 2gb of ram PCs.

Guess what room our teacher is using... of course the worse one! The second one is fine, few years ago another theacher had been using it!

I tried to convince him to change rooms but he is coming up with silly exciuses! (like "server is not working here!", well i fixed it with my friend but why are you even talking about it when you are not using yours in old class!)

PS. That server is useless anyway, every pc is connected to router that is connected to internet so supervisor pc is not mandatory, only acces restriction is enforced by win accounts.

I heard from students from my class (that picked that optional IT course) (i'm in high school) that gimp is not working because pc's are so bad!
Sometimes even notepad frezzes.🤔

Not only class is shite but teacher clearly has no idea what is he doing. (in order to pass the final from IT you need to learn simple C++, up to simple foo objects) and of course he isn not even talking about that! On one lesson about sorting algorithms he gave everybody 10 small pieces of paper with numbers on them and told everybody to sort them manualy, because he didnt know how to do it himself! So there is no doubt they wont be able code it.

I need to mention that i volontered to "clean, fix" that classroom (in order to convince teacher to move). And in that class i saw programms written in c++ on every computer! That means somebody was teaching propely before! 😣

I feel sorry for those guys, they are just waisting time. I would fall for it as well but i decided i can learn coding in home ;).
Well, results are shocking, after 1 month of coding i learned C# and i can basicly make any algorithm i ever wish. I learned about computer operation so well that i can nearly teach computer science. (i helped my friend in usa that is a electronic student with that and i'm very proud of it 😁) and it class still can't even use all 3 loops correctly... 😥 Ok i must admit i have been coding for a looooong while so i had time to learn basic c,c++ and pc operations before, but point still stands.

Why the hell are you wasting life of those studends? Why are you giving them a choice to learn coding WHEN YOU CANT EVEN USE PC YOURSELF?! (that it course is optional so you can apply if you want so)

I dont regret not bothering about it.

I’m stressing out man. I can look at let’s just say a sorting algorithm for now. I can look at that insertion sort and I can understand what’s happening, but if you were to tell me I was supposed to be able to write that just based off a description I couldn’t. I need to be able to design and understand algorithms but I don’t know where or how to start. There was some course I was gonna try and see what that does. I put aside JS completely to focus on C# but I’m just stressing out over here. I learned the basics of C# although I feel like I’m learning it wrong but I’m moving on to SQLite and it’s my first Database experience and it’s confusing me and I also don’t know how I’m going to be able to use it for my future applications yet I’m just expecting too much out of me idk I love programming but sometimes it’s a cruel mistress

Worst sorting algorithm in your opinion?

I already forgot what are the different sorting algorithms I learned last week. I already forgot sin, cos, tan, log, and some Math concepts in school. How not to forget these things easily? I could recall them once I see a sample and a brief explanation.

Generator functions should be treated like sorting algorithms: Not worth your time if all you have is 4 or less async instructions.
Callback hell is actually kind of nice and warm when you're a just a few levels down. If you're really confused by your obfuscated code, you suck at node.

I guess I should relate what work experience I have: my internship.

A little backstory I suppose. It's required at my school to do an internship to graduate except under certain circumstances. They encourage work experience a lot where I study. It was around time for me to apply for internships. However, the closest I got was a phone call with Amazon that I biffed when they started asking about stuff like sorting algorithms and other Big O notation stuff. So I was pretty desperate. I found a small company that were looking for internships and got an interview with them. The pay was dirt (I made more as a crew trainer at McDonalds) but I needed that internship and they were only 10 minutes away.

Immediate red flags when I showed up to the address. At first I thought I was wrong, But I noticed the sign of the company pointing up some stairs that were installed on the side of the house I was in front of.

Interview was a bit weird. It was with the CEO and the marketing manager. Again red flags. I show up for work a week later.

Turns out, they have no full time developers. 1st day was getting my workstation ready and 2nd day I was running Ethernet cables to the basement where the phones were connected. Spent around a week doing that.

This was supposed to be a Software Engineering internship?? Excuse me?? I came here to learn how working on Software is supposed to be like! I was also their "tech support" both for their computers and their crappy software that was built 16 years ago that people still pay for that I had NO idea how it worked because I just started and NOBODY taught me anything! To make matters worse, even if I wanted to delve into the code to see how it works it was all made in ancient Perl which didn't make things any easier.

But I needed that internship to graduate. And thus begun my 9 months with them and boy howdy I have stories to tell. Stay tuned in the future.

[Week 44 rant] Worst CS teacher experience:

In Uni (aka college), CS teacher would show introductory C code during the lecture, then proceed to run it... And compilation errors. And then spend the next 45 mins trying to fix it. Usually they would get it working in the last 5 mins of the one hour lecture.

This would go on every single lecture for the next 10-12 weeks.

Most of it was basic stuff like hello world through to sorting algorithms etc.

At the time it was pretty silly and 3/4 of the class stopped attending the lectures...

----------------

In hindsight maybe it was all intentional and training us for what real dev life would be like?

At an interview, interviewer keep on hitting me with theoretical questions, why python don't have switch cases, what is default sorting in java etc... I told him I don't bother about theory, then this conversation happened.
I(Interviewer)
I: do you know time complexities?
me: Yes
I: okay, tell me a few sorting or searching algorithms which have logarithmic complexity?
me: binary search (with loud and confident voice)
I: he told, in worst case it will have O(n) tell me any other
me: *thinking*
I: what are you thinking? what is time complexity of merge sort
me: O(nlogn)
i: it's logarithmic....

Begin teaching fundamentals much earlier. For me, I learnt Java classes and some fundamentals for it, but more basic programming skills went by the wayside until 2nd year of Uni.

The course we did on logic was good both years, but stuff like data structures and algorithms (sorting, linked lists etc) should be taught first.

Something else that might be useful is maybe not learning Java initially. What annoyed me with that (and I'm sure confused some people) was the amount of
- "Hey what does that mean?"
- "Uhh, don't worry about it yet"
which while it might encourage you to go read about it, is more likely to encourage the opposite, and tend to ask less questions, even when switching language.

I can't say for other universities, but I think a larger focus should be on gaining skills in the field, rather than becoming employable through doing employability things.
I know plenty of second year students that still couldn't have completed our first semester first year assignment, which was essentially some object manipulation wrapped up in a few classes and a basic console I/O.

Is it just me or are books on algorithms split between being too simplistic and being too detailed to be practical. I read Donald Knuth's book "The Art of Computer Programming Vol.1" read about 10% of it , which is like 3 chapters. I really enjoyed those chapters, Knuth's is such a genius but then the rest of the book was so complicated that the introduction and definition of terms was longer than some whole chapters in the same book. I decided to look for another, found a really good one, but it was analyzing algorithms in Java, sigh, I hardly code in Java so it was exactly easy for me to follow when he keeps mentioning the "comparable" attribute on sorting algorithms. I then got another really followed it till the keep on referencing indicator variables, I had read 3 books now and had not had of these indicator variables. Am sure they are not that common in the Computer Science literature so I was left wondering why I had to learn to analyze code with indicator variables though it was not a standardized in the "Computer Culture" would I be the only one who does this?.. I hence gave up on learning algorithms till I got that book that was just right for me

I had a conversation with a friend.

I : since most modern programming languages handle most of the algorithms like sorting algorithms for arrays / dictionary or finding shortest path algorithms for path location. Do you think it is still important to learn to algorithms and design since most modern programming languages handle those for you.

Friend : Nope, since it’s already available for you why should you care of how they works since they are already embedded in the programming language itself. If you are a computer scientist yes, you must learn those stuff, but if you are an IT graduate or a mere developer you dont need to learn those stuff. That’s why I am confuse in my college days why did we need to learn algorithm and design.

What is your opinion guys? Quite disappointed with his answer.

Algorithm Design Course Assignment: Sort a hexadecimal string using 4 different sorting algorithms, and display each pass on a webpage. Easy enough yeah? Oh wait. Boomer professor wants us to use a canvas based javascript library called P5.js

Why the fuck. would you enforce some random ass boomer ass javascript library on the class, rather than let students choose something they're more comfortable with so they can focus on the core of the project. IMPLEMENTING ALGORITHMS. OR AT LEAST PROVIDE BOILERPLATE CODE?? GAH!!!!!!!!

Is there any way to sort an array in such a way that picking 3 numbers a,b,c randomly from the array and performing a cyclic right shift then place them back in the array??