On Fri, 6 Aug 2004, Michael Halcrow wrote:
I wound up implementing my SQL statement parser/optimizer for Dr. Ng's database class entirely in Ruby, foregoing any hope of getting any support at all from the TA's. While many other students struggled with seg faults, trudged through manual data set manipulation, and went through endless recompilations, I was able to use Ruby's built-in set operations for union, subtraction, etc., along with its regex statements and memory management, to blast through the labs.
Unfortunately, it seems like more and more the CS classes are providing students with a large template of pre-written code that requires the student to simply fill in what's missing. Not only do I find that I learn less with this technique, but it also makes it harder to deviate to other languages--not only are you writing the project in an "unsupported" language, but you have to reimplement a large portion of the lab that the deadline requirements assume is already done for you.
There is a trade-off between giving students choices and having a well-supported code base--but unfortunately I see teachers picking the latter with little thought to the educational experience that the former can be.
~ ross
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