🏷️ programming  🏷️ education  🏷️ rant  🏷️ essay  🏷️ tech 
📆 2018-10-18

Distracted by Tools

The Sorry State of Computer Science Tuition

I’m doing a bachelor’s degree at a university of applied sciences with its own computer science department. I work part-time besides and already have a couple of years of practice in the field. In fact, I’ll soon reach the point of being longer in IT than I have spent time outside of it, for I’m already 31 years old and started my apprenticeship at the age of 16.

I’m mostly interested in programming. This term, I picked two rather big courses on that topic:

I already glanced at LISP a few times, and am somewhat familiar with the C programming language (I worked through the K&R book and wrote a couple of tiny helper programs for my personal use). Therefore, I don’t feel anxious about failing and can look forward to do the things well with reasonable effort. (I’d also like to spend some time on Go besides, if possible.) I am also willing to do the things the way it suits my working style best (working alone, not in a group; skip classes and read about the subjects on my own if, I feel like it).

However, the professors sometimes give me a hard time.

In the microcontrollers course, we’re supposed to use Windows. All the example projects are for the Codewarrior IDE, which is based on Eclipse. I asked a couple of Linux users, who did the course before, and all of them sticked to Windows for that particular part. Because working with microcontrollers is a total new field for me (except for some Arduino toy projects), I’d rather stick to the professor’s instructions and use the proposed environment.

For the C part of the course, however, which takes place on a different day, I use my usual Arch Linux setup consisting of vim, gcc and Makefiles. The professor told us to use NetBeans for that purpose, which is a bit weird in my opinion. If we use the Eclipse-based IDE Codewarrior for C programming on microcontrollers, we could certainly also use it for C programming on our local machine. But I won’t use an IDE for the C exercises anyway.

So I did fine with the C setup of my choice so far. But today, I had to present my solution to a mandatory exercise. It was about refactoring the reverse-polish calculator from the K&R book. The one big main.c file needed to be broken down into a header file and a couple of .c files. I also wrote a Makefile and used some additional compiler flags, which I both quickly showed and commented on. I demonstrated the program and showed the code in my terminal using vim.

The professor considered the exercise being well done and gave me a good hint that I could handle some variables differently. I realized that I should make them static, which I did on the fly. I re-compiled the program and ran it again, everything worked.

When I went back to my desk, the professor made an additional remark. He asked me, why I use vim. I simply stated that it is a very capable text editor, and that I’m extremely efficient working with it. He then told me a story about his apprenticeship, where apprentices sometimes used the wrong tools for a job, say, using pliers instead of a wrench for tightening a nut (it was mechanics, not IT). So he suggested using the best tool for the task at hand, which is a modern IDE like NetBeans, and not vim, according to him. Besides that, Makefiles were something the IDE generates, nothing to write on one’s own. So I should really get into using a “real and professional IDE”, and not hacky old vim.

I didn’t want to start an argument, because it was already late in the evening, and three more students needed to demonstrate their exercises within the next couple of minutes left. I just said that I use IDEs at work (mostly Eclipse and IntelliJ for Java, and sometimes RStudio for R), but that I prefer simple tools for simple tasks, like the exercise at hand.

A fellow student, who also mostly uses Linux, used Visual Studio Code for both C programming and for the presentation. (The professor didn’t comment on his choice of tools.) After the course, this fellow student and I walked to the train station, and we made some ironic remarks about the professor’s comments to blow off some steam. (As a Linux user, they really give you a hard time at that university.) The discussion got a bit more serious, and we both agreed that we should spend more time on really understanding the basics (compiler flags, the structure of a Makefile) and not waste our time with big and bloaty tools, where we spend time figuring out the difference between two slightly different icons showing a hammer, which are used to trigger a build with slightly different options.

On my way home, I had a couple of other thoughts:

Then I also thought about the other course in the morning, which was about getting in touch with Racket/Scheme. We saw very little code (not even a stereotypical Fibonacci or factorial function), talked only a bit about concepts, but spent a good deal of the two lessons learning about options and menu points in DrRacket, which is the IDE to be used during the course.

I didn’t figure out yet how to get the previous command again in the REPL (Ctrl-P or up-arrow in most shells), but heard about the option to deactivate case-sensitivity for identifiers. (I even found out how to switch the user interface language to Russian, so that for once I could give the professor a hard time.) Wouldn’t I’ve been motived enough yet to learn Scheme, those two lessons wouldn’t have done it either.

There are probably dozens of freely available LISP and Scheme implementations with capabilities exceeding our needs for a three-week introductory course by far. Pick one, get to learn how to use it, and spend the rest of the time learning about the concepts (functional programming) and the language (be it LISP, Scheme, Arc or whatever). But why wasting time installing and fine-tuning tools we’re only going to use for a couple of weeks and never will see again?

And if time is assigned to getting in touch with tools, why is it wasted on things as ephemeral as menu items, configuration forms, and not spent more wisely to get to know the command line flags (which most certainly must be known in production) or the syntax of a Makefile?

So much time is wasted on irrelevant details. (I’m not even talking about CPU time wasted during startup of those tools, nor about download traffic, memory and hard disk usage.) For tuition, one should pick the most simple tools that get a job done, learn how to work with them—and then focus on the subject matter at hand.

And, please, if a student does an effort learning things on his own and teaching them to his fellow students, be happy that the classroom gets to see a new perspective on the subject matter—including the professor, who thinks he already figured out the one and only way.