Am 21.01.2012, 05:28 Uhr, schrieb Kapps <Kapps@notvalidemail.com>:

> This issue left me with a permanent avoidance of ref foreach after encountering it the first day I used D.
>
> On 20/01/2012 10:25 PM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
>> One of the first bugs I've filed (now 1.5+ years old):
>>
>> void main()
>> {
>>      float[] arr = [1.0, 2.5, 4.0];
>>      foreach (ref double elem; arr) {
>>          elem /= 2;
>>      }
>>      writeln(arr);  // still [1, 2.5, 4]
>> }
>>
>> Issue 4510

That's a harsh decision, when you can have correct and shorter code by removing the word "double". The bug report is of course still well deserved.

Am 21.01.2012 04:48, schrieb Adam D. Ruppe:
> On Saturday, 21 January 2012 at 03:43:50 UTC, Caligo wrote:
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZtX32sKVE
>
> Oh my, don't get me started on college!
>
> I'm so happy I dropped out of that waste.


I guess this is a specific USA issue.

In Europe you will hardly get a programming job as developer if
you don't have a degree in Computer Science, Electronic, Physics
or Mathematic applied to computation, just to name a few of the
common degrees.

At least if you are looking for a company job. In case you would be
starting your own company then it is a total different matter.

--
Paulo

On Saturday, 21 January 2012 at 18:14:42 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> In Europe you will hardly get a programming job as developer if
> you don't have a degree in Computer Science, Electronic, Physics
> or Mathematic applied to computation, just to name a few of the
> common degrees.

A lot of Americans are like that too. I work
for myself though, so it's not a big deal to me
personally.

On Saturday, January 21, 2012 19:14:41 Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Am 21.01.2012 04:48, schrieb Adam D. Ruppe:
> > On Saturday, 21 January 2012 at 03:43:50 UTC, Caligo wrote:
> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZtX32sKVE
> > 
> > Oh my, don't get me started on college!
> > 
> > I'm so happy I dropped out of that waste.
> 
> I guess this is a specific USA issue.
> 
> In Europe you will hardly get a programming job as developer if you don't have a degree in Computer Science, Electronic, Physics or Mathematic applied to computation, just to name a few of the common degrees.
> 
> At least if you are looking for a company job. In case you would be starting your own company then it is a total different matter.

I think that that's frequently the case in the US as well, but it's not impossible to get a job as long as you have decent programming skills - especially in a good economy (which wouldnt' be right now) - even if you don't have a colleg education. And once you have a decent amount of job experience under your belt, it'll matter a lot less. But there are definitely jobs that will be closed to you if you don't have a degree - especially early in your career. I have at least one co-worker who's never gone to college and whose an extremely good programmer and has been at it for 10 - 15 years now. But whether that route works and/or is a good idea depends on a lot of factors. You _will_ do better getting a job if you have a college degree, but it might be more economical to skip out on college if you can get a reasonable programming skillset on your own and manage to find work.

- Jonathan M Davis

"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg@gmx.com> wrote in message news:mailman.661.1327176314.16222.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
> On Saturday, January 21, 2012 19:14:41 Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Am 21.01.2012 04:48, schrieb Adam D. Ruppe:
>> > On Saturday, 21 January 2012 at 03:43:50 UTC, Caligo wrote:
>> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZtX32sKVE
>> >
>> > Oh my, don't get me started on college!
>> >
>> > I'm so happy I dropped out of that waste.
>>
>> I guess this is a specific USA issue.
>>
>> In Europe you will hardly get a programming job as developer if you don't have a degree in Computer Science, Electronic, Physics or Mathematic applied to computation, just to name a few of the common degrees.
>>
>> At least if you are looking for a company job. In case you would be starting your own company then it is a total different matter.
>
> I think that that's frequently the case in the US as well, but it's not
> impossible to get a job as long as you have decent programming skills -
> especially in a good economy (which wouldnt' be right now) - even if you
> don't
> have a colleg education. And once you have a decent amount of job
> experience
> under your belt, it'll matter a lot less. But there are definitely jobs
> that
> will be closed to you if you don't have a degree - especially early in
> your
> career. I have at least one co-worker who's never gone to college and
> whose an
> extremely good programmer and has been at it for 10 - 15 years now. But
> whether that route works and/or is a good idea depends on a lot of
> factors.
> You _will_ do better getting a job if you have a college degree, but it
> might
> be more economical to skip out on college if you can get a reasonable
> programming skillset on your own and manage to find work.
>

That reminds me: There's a *LOT* of people who told me "If two equally good people apply for the same job, and one has a degree and other other doesn't, the one with the degree will get the job." They always seem to think that's convincing, but there's three problems with it:

1. That's a fairly contrived scenario.

2. So...what, it's a $100k, 4+ year **tie-breaker**?? Sounds like a collosal waste to me.

And probably most importantly:

3. If you take all that time and money that would have gone into a degree and put it into building *real* skills and experience instead wasting it all on taking exams, cramming for exams instead of *actually* learning, homework assignments instead of *real* projects, etc., then you'd have something far better than a tie-breaker: You'd *be* the better candidate, by far. (And hell, if the other candidate is a middle-class white male, you'd have *far* less debt and could undercut the them on salary while *still* ending up with much more spending money.)

On 01/20/2012 10:48 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Saturday, 21 January 2012 at 03:43:50 UTC, Caligo wrote:
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZtX32sKVE
>
> Oh my, don't get me started on college!
>
> I'm so happy I dropped out of that waste.

Yeah, I like the qualifications that Paulo and Jonathan add to this.

My current job would have been unreachable without a college degree. Was it worth it?  Yes.  Would it have been worth it if I had to burden the ENTIRE cost of college on my student loans?  No, probably not.  I had a lot of help from parents on this, and some grants.

I pay about $400 a mo. in student loans.  Annoying, but not bad if you're living on the cheap in Ohio.

I also took a Physics degree instead of a CS degree.

I don't think American colleges teach Computer Science/Engineering very well at all.  My physics degree was an Engineering Physics degree and thus had an engineering "emphasis" which I filled with some CS courses, mostly because they'd bring up my grades after the physics classes.  A few of them were pretty legit, but then OSU insisted on teaching this RESOLVE stuff.  Now, I'm not going to make the argument that it's bad because no one uses that in the workplace.  I'm down with using an obscure programming language for pedagogy as long as there is a reason.  But what RESOLVE is... they want it to be reusable code, but obviously they don't take DRY seriously, because they make you duplicate code all over the place.  Duplicate code is not reusable or maintainable.  That is my biggest complaint with it, and it soured my opinion of the whole thing for the entire time.  Oh, and they also liked to invent terminology for things that already had prior terminology, which is dumb.  There are more complaints, but I'll stop there.

Right.  So I took a physics degree.  The physics part actually seemed very legit.  Physics profs tend to know their shit.  I actually have a lot of respect for that side of things.  I think I gained a lot from the Physics classes in terms of rigorous thinking and problem solving abilities.  That's the stuff that allows me to tackle /hard/ problems, and in any field.

I also took a game development class.  Took it twice.  It was pegged at grad-level.  And it really was /development/; you were expected to be an expert in some field before signing on and teaming up.  It was all about teaching people how to collaborate on these things and deal with the large amount of detail work that goes into games.  I think I learned a lot about how to manage such projects from doing that class.  But more importantly, I think it helped me build my self-identity.  It taught me that I really do enjoy this game development stuff, even though there are some hard and shitty parts to it.  I am OK with that, and still enjoy it for all of the novel challenges and cool experiences.

So college wasn't all that bad to me.  They still need to change the funding model here in the states though.  That shit is broken as fuck. For some people, namely those that are talented and have good self-motivation, it may very well be worth their while to skip that mess.  Probably doesn't work for physics though; it can be hard to do experimental physics on your own ;)

Also, the D newsgroup is probably better at teaching programming than college.  Hmmmmm.  ;)

On 1/21/12 3:56 PM, Chad J wrote:
> I don't think American colleges teach Computer Science/Engineering very
> well at all.

Wonder why. USA does have the best programmers in the world though.

Andrei

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote in message news:jffd0g$2d0u$1@digitalmars.com...
> On 1/21/12 3:56 PM, Chad J wrote:
>> I don't think American colleges teach Computer Science/Engineering very well at all.
>
> Wonder why. USA does have the best programmers in the world though.
>

At least part of that's because many of them move here. Like Linus Torvalds. And this one guy, I forget his name, but he's really well known for C++ template metaprogramming, even wrote a highly-regarded book about it... ;)

"Chad J" <chadjoan@__spam.is.bad__gmail.com> wrote in message news:jffcaj$2bug$1@digitalmars.com...
>
> I don't think American colleges teach Computer Science/Engineering very well at all.  My physics degree was an Engineering Physics degree and thus had an engineering "emphasis" which I filled with some CS courses, mostly because they'd bring up my grades after the physics classes.  A few of them were pretty legit, but then OSU insisted on teaching this RESOLVE stuff.  Now, I'm not going to make the argument that it's bad because no one uses that in the workplace.  I'm down with using an obscure programming language for pedagogy as long as there is a reason. But what RESOLVE is... they want it to be reusable code, but obviously they don't take DRY seriously, because they make you duplicate code all over the place.  Duplicate code is not reusable or maintainable.  That is my biggest complaint with it, and it soured my opinion of the whole thing for the entire time.  Oh, and they also liked to invent terminology for things that already had prior terminology, which is dumb.  There are more complaints, but I'll stop there.
>

I have a friend who went through OSU's CS program and I remember him complaining about Resolve, too. But I dunno, I've visited OSU and I still think it's more of a football franchise slash commercial real estate developer than a school... 'Course, considering what I think of schools, that may not be much of a complaint ;)

>
> So college wasn't all that bad to me.  They still need to change the funding model here in the states though.  That shit is broken as fuck.

What are you talking about? It works great as long as your family's not middle-class, or if you're female, or if you're not caucasian...And that's ok for middle-class white males, since we apperently get everything we could ever desire handed to us on a silver platter just for being white males...I mean, show of hands, how many of the white males here got their "Set for life, because you're a white male" care package? See. Everybody.

On 01/21/2012 05:08 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 1/21/12 3:56 PM, Chad J wrote:
>> I don't think American colleges teach Computer Science/Engineering very
>> well at all.
>
> Wonder why. USA does have the best programmers in the world though.
>
> Andrei
>

Sorry I have no numbers to back this up, but I conjecture that many of them are self-taught.

Interestingly, my roommate also mentioned that a certain facet of the American culture might help in this regard: the higher regard for self-starting and making one's own way.  Maybe this makes life easier for those that teach themselves their trade?  (IMO, I also suspect it's partially responsible for the broken college funding model because it gets distorted in a financial context and becomes "college is your own financial decision, so you are expected to pay for it on your own".)