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Workshops of doom.

February 16, 2005, 10:53 am

I was taking a workshop on graphics in Java for 2nd-year undergrads this morning. When presented with the error “Cannot find file: DrawHouse.java”, I was asked what it meant. It makes me wonder about the relative merits of learning to program it right first time, versus teaching effective debugging skills. I know one is usually taught that if a program is sufficiently well designed bugs can be limited but I wonder if having an entire module dedicated to debugging wouldn’t be overkill. I know most of my debugging skills have advanced when someone’s looked over my shoulder and said “why don’t you..?” or “don’t you know about…?”.

I have to give a seminar to my department on Friday, I was going to spend the afternoon writing that but my brain may now be unreachable for the rest of the day.

Remko’s started up an interesting discussion on the Psi forum about status states; do we really need 7 distinct states in jabber? So far no-one’s jumped to the defense of the full range, which seems interesting. I’m personally partway, I don’t want to have only two, as ichat does, and Remko’s interested in but I don’t see the need for seperate ‘Away’ and ‘Extended Away’ states, nor ‘Free For Chat’ and ‘Online’, although I see why they exist :
http://psi.affinix.com/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=2521

Categories: Computers, Psi, Work
3 Comments »

3 Responses to “Workshops of doom.”

machekku wrote on March 1, 2005

I had 4-month Java course, and I learned how to compile a program at the last week. Why? I because I used IDE to develop the project. At the very end, I just asked someone how to use javac (or something like this).

Kev wrote on March 1, 2005

That isn’t the case for our undergraduates though, they use javac from the very start. I think this is preferable, personally; hiding internals from programmers with an IDE isn’t a good way to learn. You need to understand the basics before you can effectively use tools to make life easy for yourself.

machekku wrote on March 2, 2005

Personally, I don’t think that knowing ‘javac sth.java’ (or it was another command?) would help me much to learn Java ;)
Pressing F5 is as “magical” as typing ‘javac sth.java’, but at least you don’t have to leave the editor to do this, and you don’t have to search for the line containing the error :)

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