Undefined OOP Techniques
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@dkf said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
There's two types of tutors. There's the type you describe, who deal with questions relating to the content of the course (and who may be TAs), and there's the kind we're talking about who are responsible for the overall academic progress of the student (and who are definitely academic staff). The latter role can usually look after a whole lot of students without much load; we tend to have one such academic per undergraduate year (i.e., a couple of hundred students).
Ah. We call those "[faculty] advisors," and yes, every student gets one.
@asdf said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
It can be very helpful to have some go-to-guy for your problems/questions.
Yeah, it was just a vocabulary issue.
@asdf said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
In Germany, pretty much everyone lives off-campus in shared apartments.
Sucks to be you guys. Living in a dorm for a few years was awesome.
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@asdf said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
At my former uni, only some faculties assign tutors to each student, CS was not one of them.
I went to a really big university. We had every resource imaginable available to the students, but you had to actually go and schedule yourself. Heck, you could go there for twenty years without ever graduating and no one would ever give you shit for it.
Individual departments did sometimes have a more hands-on approach. I had to be accepted not only to the university as a student, but I also had to be accepted to the School of Engineering, and the Mechanical Engineering department. Still, we graduated about 400 mechanical engineers every year, so you could still go unnoticed. However, the one Engineering Physics student got a lot of personal attention.
A lot of this was because 6000 freshmen declared their major as Engineering every year, but only 600 seniors graduated with an engineering degree.
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@Jaime said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
A lot of this was because 6000 freshmen declared their major as Engineering every year, but only 600 seniors graduated with an engineering degree.
That's a huge difference from us. We're pretty large, and we graduate a large fraction (>90%) of the people we take on.
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@boomzilla said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
Sucks to be you guys.
I don't disagree. American universities may be expensive as shit, and you won't get better lectures for your money (quality of teaching is comparable), but it's a lot more comfortable to study in the US than in Germany, where you're left on your own. Hell, some profs even try to sell that fact as an advantage, and condescendingly compare US universities to high schools. "Academic freedom" my ass, not-giving-a-fuck-about-your-students is not something you should brag about.
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@boomzilla said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
Ah. We call those "[faculty] advisors," and yes, every student gets one.
When I was at freshmen orientation, I looked around and saw a bunch of people who's name tags had their name and the name of an advisor. Mine (and all of the other engineer's) just said "Engineering" for an advisor. We met with our advisor in groups of about twenty. The most ominous sign was that every entering engineering freshmen was given a planning book to plan out both a four-year and a five-year course schedule. Some people were a year behind before taking their first class.
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@asdf said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
American universities may be expensive as shit
Yay subsidies! I'm kind of hoping for the bubble to pop before my kids get there, but I have little hope (and not sure what other fallout will come from that).
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@asdf said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
not-giving-a-fuck-about-your-students is not something you should brag about.
But treating them like adults is. If you graduate from an American university that has more than 20,000 students, you are self-motivated. That's an important skill for your professional future.
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@dkf said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
That's a huge difference from us. We're pretty large, and we graduate a large fraction (>90%) of the people we take on.
We graduated them, just not as engineers. Only a handful of freshmen declared their major as Psychology, but we graduated more than 5000 per year.
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@Jaime said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
I went to a really big university. We had every resource imaginable available to the students, but you had to actually go and schedule yourself. Heck, you could go there for twenty years without ever graduating and no one would ever give you shit for it.
Sounds familiar. Except that you now have to be finished after 4/3 years, since Bachelor and Master were introduced, but the guidance is as shitty as it was before. Many people drop out after more than 3 years when they realize they won't be able to finish their degree in time.
@Jaime said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
A lot of this was because 6000 freshmen declared their major as Engineering every year, but only 600 seniors graduated with an engineering degree.
Sounds about right.
@Jaime said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
freshmen orientation
Ah, good memories. I was one of the organizers of our freshmen orientation. It was always a lot of fun to get nerds to loosen up and party for a week.
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@Jaime said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
But treating them like adults is.
True, but German universities usually use that as an excuse for not caring about their students at all. Or, more precisely, for their shitty organization skills (I'll give them the benefit of doubt and assume they actually do care and are just crap at actually helping).
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@asdf said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
I'll give them the benefit of doubt
I won't. Either they're outright maliciously incompetent or they're incompetent by happenstance, but either way they suck.
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@dkf Let's just say that the competencies of German universities are, in this order:
- Research
TeachingGiving lectures
They have no fucking clue how to handle their students and actually make people graduate.
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@dkf Gotta love differences in terminology. In my college/university experiences:
Tutors are people (usually other students) who aren't attached to a specific class, but can help you with homework.
TAs are the students attached to a specific class who can help you with questions about that class. They also often teach labs or other secondary sessions.
Advisors are folks from your major's department who oversee your academic advancement, answer questions about things like which classes to take, and help you with paperwork. You see them if your grades slip. They may recommend you see a counselor.
Counselors are people from the college/university who help you deal with life issues, psychological problems, and such.
Learning Drone 9652342, reporting for class!
As for other stuff: no OOP specific classes. Our intro classes were taught with Scheme; the rest was mostly C with some MATLAB and some projects where you could use whatever. I thought the Operating Systems class that was basically "Intro to fork() and pipe()" was rather misleading, but I guess I should be lucky that any of my classes admitted computers actually existed.
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@Parody said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
no OOP specific classes
When I was an undergraduate, our OOP classes used Modula-3.
Nobody uses Modula-3. There are good reasons for this datum.
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@dkf said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
When I was an undergraduate, our OOP classes used Modula-3.
Nobody uses Modula-3. There are good reasons for this datum.Pascal was invented for teaching and never intended to be used in real life. However, enough people knew it after their schooling that some bright spark decided he could sell a commercial compiler because people could be productive on it quickly since they already knew the language. The rest is
Delphihistory.
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@dkf I wrote one of my first year projects in Commodore 64 BASIC, complete with tractor feed printout and bringing my computer to a classroom to demonstrate.
I got better.
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@Jaime said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
Pascal was invented for teaching and never intended to be used in real life.
But Modula-3… well, you've never touched it. NOBODY has (except a few poor students on my course). This was because it sucked. I've crashed workstations with it just from trying to compile a hello-world program, let alone run it…
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AFAIK, it was never common even in university courses; the few who continued using Wirth languages in the 1990s at all generally used either Object Pascal, Delphi, or (rarely) Oberon. M-3 wasn't even Wirth's creation - a different professor came up with it, and when he asked Wirth if he was interested, got a polite but firm negative - Wirth had already started working on Oberon, which was his own half-hearted attempt at an OOP language - Wirth later decided that OOP was shit, and tore out most of those facilities when he went on to design Oberon-2.
Oberon is now better known for the 'runnable text' and 'slim binaries' techniques used in the OS it was intertwined with, and for eschewing all forms of interrupts in favor of forced cooperative multitasking - he decided that event-driven program was Evil with a capital E, so he didn't even have interrupt hardware in the workstation he built for it. The compiler would automatically insert system calls to cede control back to the scheduler at intervals, and every loop had at least one such sleep call.
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@ScholRLEA said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
Wirth had already started working on Oberon, which was his own half-hearted attempt at an OOP language
I saw Oberon in use; it obviously drew a lot of inspiration from Smalltalk. It was neat I guess, but pretty obvious (even to the greenhorn I was at that point) that it wasn't going to lead anywhere much relevant. The problems it really set out to solve just weren't the problems that people tended to have.
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@dkf said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
Why can't the C++ committee stop with this pretence and define an evaluation orde
For the same reason the C committee never did: any given defined order would hose at least one vendor or end user.
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@dkf said in Undefined OOP Techniques:
Why can't the C++ committee stop with this pretence and define an evaluation order (and let the compiler handle the non-breaking reorderings)?
Because then people would be able to write shit like
z = ++x+y+++x;(valid C#!) without getting haunted by nasal demons for the rest of their lives.
