insertwackynamehere
The Chewbacca defense gone nightmare
Posts: 3016
Registered: 03-03 |
I know what you mean, but I like to think I'm somewhat better than that. I do my best to write good code and on top of that I have been doing computer science stuff since 8th grade. I love programming and I think that taking my first class this semester was very beneficial because it only opened doors for me and taught me how to do things I wondered about. Of course, I know what the article describes and I see it all the time; people who could be described as code-monkeys but don't really understand what they're doing and can't translate it over. I like to think that I understand what I know enough that I could learn another language's syntax and have a fairly easy time programming in it.
I'm not trying to sound like a dick, btw, I just think I'm better than that and in fact I have been applying it throughout all of high school. I went from teaching myself HTML to learning a bit of C++ to PHP to learning some Java from a class I took in HS and expanding it from there. In class at NYU, (my first compsci class, besides an "Intro to CompSci" class I took at UPenn summer of 10th grade) we learned the Huffman algorithm for compression and simulated it because we didn't learn anything about binary files. I did all the homeworks and got 100s, but instead of just accepting 101101 (or whatever) as a series of integers which isn't really compressed because its 6 bytes (or 32 bytes if written to the file as ints), when in reality it represents 6 bits of a byte, I decided to fork the homework and ended up writing a somewhat buggy compression program and huffman "zip" file format of my own design. For the most part, it could write and read huffman compressed text to a file, although I got bored before working out all the bugs.
In fact, that was what made me want to program even more, because now that I understood working with bytes and bits (and bits are very hard to work with in Java), it opened up a lot of options for me. That is why I decided to make jwadlib, I had an urge to code and jwadlib would let me understand more about Doom's internal workings and work with binary file structures.
Anyway, I took the class referenced by the article, I believe. The first course in systems is what I am taking next semester; you learn Assembly and C, it is called Computer Systems Organization. I just finished Data Structures. I placed out of the computer intro and compsci classes. But yeah, I understand Java's shortcomings and I think that Java probably does contribute to code monkey syndrome but I just want to clarify that I really want to avoid that and try to actually learn. I really enjoy coding and trying to figure things out and I enjoy what I'm doing and really look forward to a future in it. But yeah, I find it interesting that the professors at NYU are thinking of changing it. And I also don't want to come off sounding like I'm better than others or anything, but I take pride in my work and just want to acknowledge that I understand the shortcomings of many Java programmers and Java itself but I do my best to avoid the pitfalls of not actually understanding what it is I'm doing and praying it works.
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01-06-08 19:18 
