mrry (Happy New Year)
 
Blog Almost Over 10/Jun/2003

You'll no doubt be ecstatic to know that my seemingly-interminable exams finish tomorrow, with the unholy pair of Data Structures and Algorithms 2, and Software Design and Implementation 2.

I really like programming, and I'm the first to admit that we need to have exams on it, but since the advent of interactive computing, I can see little-to-no point in writing code on a piece of paper. We learn in SDI that you can (and, indeed, should) take an incremental or phased approach to writing programs. Why, then, do we write code on paper, which is only suitable for one-shot, unless you want to get dragged into a mire of footnotes, asterisks and scorings out.

It's horribly unintuitive, but I suppose it does serve to prove that we have or haven't learned enough about programming to be considered Computer Scientists. And there's less scope for plagiarism.

Maybe you'll be glad to see the end of my pithy exam summaries, who knows? I know the topics (not least Haskell type checking) have tended to be esoteric, but I look upon each of those exams as a shared experience for more than 200 people each. I'd like to think that in years to come, someone will search for these exams and find this site - perhaps that's ridiculous, but I can dream, can't it?

Anyways, apologies for the discursive post - I'm steeling myself for tomorrow's horribleness.

Cheers,

Derek.

 
CommentsComments 

Name

E-Mail

Url

Comment

Please enter the number 7830 in the box below:

 
CommentsTell a friend about this page

Your Name

Your E-Mail

Your friend's E-Mail

 
SideboardSideboard


< # Scottish Blogs ? >
Technorati Profile
Listed on BlogShares

Subscribe to the mrry RSS feed
More about RSS.
Trackback URL for this article:
http://www.mrry.co.uk/trackback/1709