IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

Student does as teacher teaches.

Like I said before his "teaching" is just linking toTutorials for Codingand that is all. He has changed his grading criteria 3 times now in an 8 week class citing that the default grading system put in place was wrong and that he didn't have time to fix it before class ... an online class. My question I asked in week 2 about the homework that was asked on Wednesday for homework due on Sunday was answered on Monday and I was docked points but then he "graciously" allowed me to redo it.

The "teacher" is merely there to put checks in boxes at this point.

It's also a single comment made here on a forum and not there in the class discussion from frustration where a teacher says something stupid about homework that fulfills his grading requirement 100%. Why would you give somebody 100% on an assignment and then explain to them they could have done less work to get the same result as if going above the minimum was something negative?

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Wife has had to deal with that in her classes. Stupid shit like asking for an opinion then following it up by asking for the source.

Teaching a subject doesn't involve just telling students how to do it. It is also about how to do it correctly so that later on you don't run into problems.He gave you a 100%, but then included notes on how you should have done it. That seems to be generous, not something you should complain about.

For example, if asked for a code fragment to test if a character is a digit and you responded with...

if (c == '1' || c == '2' || ....)

that would be technically correct and possibly give you full points if written out fully, but a good professor should most definitely tell you the better ways to write that. If they gave you full points anyway (even when doing it in a horribly inefficient way), you should be thankful.


edit: Anyway, I can understand if you are just ranting to rant, just trying to give you this guy's point of view. He might very well be a dick and you weren't clear enough in your explanation of what he did.

You can "technically" almost always change between for and while loops. Sometimes a while will perform the required logic cleaner than a for and vice versa but rarely will you *have* to write it one way or another.

Cad_sl said:

You could have done it with while loops and it would possibly be more flexible but it'd also be more bug-prone since you'd have to have an escape condition to exit the program. Since he didn't specify either way and didn't take any points off, I'd take it as constructive criticism and move on.

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Every loop needs an escape condition.

I don't think any looping is inherently safer than any other - but if we're talking new programmers, I think a while loop is the most dangerous. And dangerous is used loosely because it's just some array they're probably iterating over and not some critical system.

I had to fix a bug in some code where a guy was indexing an array out of bounds, like specifically called array[10] when he defined the array as 10 in length. So the shit happens in the real world too.

Do you guys prefer any keyboards for programming? I like my mac's keyboard, but it isn't really good to program on. I feel like the keys are very light-touch, so it's easy for me to mis-type stuff. They gave me a microsoft USB keyboard, but it's generic keyboard #13 or whatever.

Was thinking about picking up a Corsair mechanical, but will people at the office hate me? It's quiet as shit in here. If my chair creaks I feel 1000 eyes on me.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

Right, I didn't feel comfortable planning an exit route that wasn't what I did with defining how many times I looped.

The way I understand it you have two major methods:

1.) You define how many times you are going to loop at the beginning of the loop
2.) You loop forever until given a manual exit.

Does that sound right? I felt that the manual exit was clunky and a little out of my control. I would have to define it (possible bug there) and then also they could screw up the exit (possible bug there) meaning I would need exits to the exit with default erros (even more possible bugs). All of this is why I didn't define an error exit for E, G-Z, and 0-9 etc.

I don't know if I expressed it well but I just kind of don't get a lot of these concepts and don't have a mind or gift for coding. It just doesn't come to me very naturally at all. That 61 line code up there took me several rewrites, help from you guys here, help from probably 6 other guys online, cut and pasting from a forum with a similar project, and eventually a "fuck it, just do it live" submission on the last day I could. Then I get a "technically" response and nothing talking about the questions and concerns I did bring up. I was annoyed a bit.

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Don't worry about not getting it or having a mind for coding. In the beginning it's really like learning a whole new language with all sorts of new concepts. Even for us in the biz, I'm sure it didn't come easy. Things like looping, memory management, etc. don't feel natural when you first learn them. On top of that, it's difficult for a new person to really understand the big picture and know all the common pitfalls. You've heard us talking about out of bound arrays and stuff, but I guarantee you when you first start using arrays that will be the first thing you mess up.

When you get to pointers, may god have mercy on your soul.

Just approach it with an open mind, you'll look back at your early coding samples and laugh at how easy it is. I remember when I first started C++... awful.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

I do think I have some kind of memory leak in there. It takes a bit too long computing for how simple it is.

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Your intro stuff should run so fast that the output looks instant. Can you post the code?