I think my school is particularly extreme in its anti-MS sentiment, but I'm sure almost everyone on both sides of the fence have dealt with this kind of crap.

Isn't it scary how stultifying all this BS is?

I wish it would end.

There have been some great discussions of your various technical options.

I would just like to endorse your maturity and intelligence in this comment. The anti-Microsoft crowd is loud, and they assume that all virtue and intelligence is on their side, whereas there are many more very competent people who quietly use Microsoft, or both Microsoft and FOSS, and produce much of the world's best software.

I don't know for sure why the Microsoft developers are not so loud. My guess is that it's because they are just professional, rather than idealogical about their choices.

Keep up the great work. You certainly won't hurt you education by learning within the (anti-Microsoft) confines they have imposed - no one disputes that there's a lot of great FOSS software out there. Just keep your mind open, as you have been doing.

Avoid Microsoft vs FOSS arguments with zealots. It's like religion, climate change, wars, etc...

By on 3/9/2010 4:34 PM ()

Avoid Microsoft vs FOSS arguments with zealots. It's like religion, climate change, wars, etc...

+1 to that.

By on 3/9/2010 10:54 PM ()

It would be cool to know what this institution is.

Attitudes like that are the enemy of progress and the future of the nations they reside in.

With that knowledge others will know who to steer clear of.

I wonder if there's a survey of this sort of thing somewhere out there?

By on 3/8/2010 8:12 PM ()

Gary just said exactly what I was thinking. Use Haskell/Happy if you want to bring the functional touch to your assignment.

I did quite a lot of parsers with Happy a few years ago. It is quite neat and can generate monadic parsers as well. It used to work well with GHC

IME it is quite hard to fight back against a heavily prejudiced teacher; sometimes they may even get offended if you prove them wrong :S

By on 3/8/2010 7:27 AM ()

sounds like Haskell is a natural choice in this situation. I fail to see the advantage of F#(over Haskell) in this case. You don't need .NET interop which is one of the biggest strength of F# over Haskell/Ocaml.

By on 3/8/2010 7:05 AM ()

sounds like Haskell is a natural choice in this situation. I fail to see the advantage of F#(over Haskell) in this case.

Yeah, I started doing it in Haskell since it's the bread & butter language of the course anyway. I'm liking Happy a lot. I'm sort of tempted to port it to F# later on anyway, like cfern and mau said, to show that it can be done -- but I don't think I'm enough of a keneer to go through with it :)

It would be cool to know what this institution is.

Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada. It's said to have one of the most prestigious computer science departments in Canada next to Waterloo. It's definitely more challenging than, say, UBC, but the curriculum is a total pedagogical failure, and most of the professors are either completely unqualified or driven by sheer spite.

One of my profs tried to teach C, himself only knowing Java. He had no concept of memory deallocation, of null-terminated strings, of the difference between C and C++, or of not lecturing in the middle of an exam (I kid you not).

Another taught MFC. Last year.

Another taught chapter 3 (set theory) before teaching chapter 2 (predicate logic), and became furious when the class average on the midterm was less than 30%. This prof, by the way, is the curriculum designer for the comp sci department.

My languages prof for this course is pretty good and he does keep his snarky political comments to a minimum, but I don't want to take any risks.

</rant>

By on 3/8/2010 10:03 PM ()

Having studied in three different countries and in Universities that were considered at least "good", I can tell you that you find this situation nearly everywhere. Some unis may be better at tackling it, but still you find people that shouldn't be teaching at all more often that you would like to. Some of these morons even get awards for their teaching (I am not kidding).

As long as you are a quizzical and bookish (and smart by delivering suited answers to avoid being unfairly penalised), they won't really cause that much damage.

It is a pity they are allowed to lecture or design curricula, since nobody should to spend extra hours to compensate the lack of skills of a lecturer or omissions of a poorly designed module.

By on 3/9/2010 3:40 AM ()

Having studied in three different countries and in Universities that were considered at least "good", I can tell you that you find this situation nearly everywhere.

I figured. I've considered switching to UBC, but my friends there tell me similar horror stories as well -- though we seem to agree that SFU is still the worse of the two. Ultimately it boils down to weighing whether the marginally better profs at UBC merit switching schools and losing credit in the process yet again.

I've switched between several schools so far too, and since I've been coding for most of my life either for work or out of personal interest, I really just want to get my degree over with. I would love to be able to say that I go to school to learn, but at this point I simply don't have that luxury anymore -- especially since I already have about 2 years worth of credits in unrelated fields. So I'm probably just going to have to suck it up and appease my profs.

I would just like to endorse your maturity and intelligence in this comment. The anti-Microsoft crowd is loud, and they assume that all virtue and intelligence is on their side, whereas there are many more very competent people who quietly use Microsoft, or both Microsoft and FOSS, and produce much of the world's best software.

Thanks, it's encouraging to know that some people share my view. I don't know why the pro-Microsoft camp is so quiet either. I think you're right, it probably has something to do with professionalism. It probably also doesn't help that the FOSS community is upheld by some people (*cough* Stallman) that rally people up with intense feelings of victimization. It becomes politically incorrect to hit back at them or even defend yourself.

But Haskell's a good example of people happily being on both sides. Some of the top Haskell contributors, including one of the initial designers, are big wigs at Microsoft.

By on 3/10/2010 2:37 PM ()

I don't know why the pro-Microsoft camp is so quiet either. I think you're right, it probably has something to do with professionalism.

Is there even a pro-MS camp or even a need for one? I can easily be pro-F# or pro-WPF without being either pro- or anti-MS. Professionalism as you say, you use the tools best suited for the job.

I'm still glad that there are so many people who get so emotionally involved in FOSS, that they can find the energy and motivation to provide us with free tools and create competition for the big companys. Competition is always a good thing ;-).

By on 3/11/2010 4:36 AM ()

There's definitely a pro-MS camp. I think I was amongst them at one point, until I realized that I don't need to love MS to hate when people hate MS for no reason or for the wrong reasons. I think it made sense to "love" MS when it was a much smaller company with a very coherent vision; at this point with 10k+ employees, it's too much of a generalization to either love it or hate it. It makes a lot more sense to, say, love F# and hate Zune.

Anyway in other news, I got 20/20 on my assignment having done it in Haskell :D

I couldn't figure out exception handling but I left a note explaining how I would have done it if the syntax weren't an obstacle. I even accidentally parsed '/' as subtraction. Guess Haskell made my prof happy.

Thanks for the advice and encouragement everyone.

By on 3/19/2010 8:56 PM ()

Doing it in F# might bring someone to the other side of the fence.
You might also compile on Mono, just to show it can be done without MS's help! (sorta...)

By on 3/8/2010 1:39 AM ()

If I were in your situation, I'd try to build something nice in F# just to show that not everything Microsoft related is 'evil'. But then again, I don't know how bad your situation is.

If it's really bad, try building something in OCaml (with ocamllex/-yacc).
It's open source, and close to F#, but you will need to watch out for the (non-light!) syntax differences.

By on 3/8/2010 1:20 AM ()
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