You need to keep one thing in mind though: 300 and 400 level classes are not about teaching a language or how to program(you're supposed to know how to program by then). Those classes are about teaching concepts in diverse areas of computer science rather than teach you how to do this in C, then this other thing in perl, and this other thing in python. I totally agree that we should be always striving to learn as much as we can. I'm always reading books on languages i don't know, like perl, php, C# or whatever. I've also taken classes from other departments to learn new things (I took Chum 287 to learn VB .NET, probably that was not useful, lol. Also took some some Web programming classes from other depts. and i'm planning in taking some Maya classes from the Visual Arts dept.). Since we already know how to program, I don't see why it is bad to have templates for labs, since at this point we need to focus on learning the concepts or the technologies that are being taught instead of syntax of a new language. Chris
Chris Alvarez [EMAIL PROTECTED] ext. 1-3837 IS&T Web Applications Services Novell, Inc., the leading provider of information solutions http://www.novell.com >>>[EMAIL PROTECTED] 08/06 9:11 am >>> 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 BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
