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Wow that sounds like a really frustrating and demotivating experience. Seems totally ridiculous and beyond any realistic expectations - I’m surprised nobody inv

Wow that sounds like a really frustrating and demotivating experience. Seems totally ridiculous and beyond any realistic expectations - I’m surprised nobody involved didn’t raise concerns. I had a similar but not as bad experience. The lecturer was brand new and wanted us to design a programming language after a single vague PowerPoint and the worst introduction to yacc or lex or whatever they are. We were also undergraduates. After several weeks of complaints he provided an example language and parser etc. Still it was simply too hard and in the end nobody could do it. I believe I managed to add a minor feature to his example language as my submission. I managed to get a reasonably high grade simply because I freely admitted I struggled with the entire task but could explain language theory and made comparisons with other languages I know and what features I would have added if I could. Some people totally wrote that whole module off and planned around the scoring system where one failed module in a year would just be discounted and an averaged score created.

coldtea 5y ago
>Wow that sounds like a really frustrating and demotivating experience. Seems totally ridiculous and beyond any realistic expectations What, the 3 hour compile time? That's an OS+utils, there are projects that take more... Ever tried compiling QT+KDE?
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Back in the SuSE 6.3 days that would take a whole night.
  - brimble 5y ago
    Old Gentoo user chiming in. My "I won't be using my computer today" builds were either major desktop environment (or anything that forced me to rebuild the GTK or QT shared libs), and... OpenOffice. Good lord, that one took forever. Firefox probably came next after those.
    - mindentropy 5y ago
      Oh man I was a Gentoo user once. That was funny and brought a lot of memories back. I was building KDE from source and it took 1.5 days to build I think lol.
- joezydeco 5y ago
  Try Yocto with Qt. Ugh. I have a 48-core server just for this task.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    How are you building your Qt ? I just tested on my machine (i7-6900k, 8C/16T from 6 years ago), building 5.15: qtbase, qtdeclarative, graphicaleffects,multimedia,quick controls2, serial port, svg, wayland and websockets takes 8 minutes total... it's hardly the end of the world and that's already more than needed for 99.9% of Qt apps. And I don't even use ccache. make -j16 5343,12s user 307,95s system 1198% cpu 7:51,67 total here's my configure line: ~/libs/qt5/configure -nomake tests -nomake examples -debug -confirm-license -opensource -platform linux-clang -linker lld
    - joezydeco 5y ago
      Oh sure, building an isolated Qt instance is quick. But adding the Yocto overhead (entire bootloader, kernel, and then fetch/decompress/build all the packages) takes a bit more time. And Qwebkit isn't trivial either. Once Yocto has it all in sstate-cache then it's only like 15 minutes for a total rebuild.
      - jcelerier 5y ago
        yeah, if you need webkit that's much longer for sure.
native_samples 5y ago
I guess it must be common. I had a very similar experience at university except without the fillip of lecturers who actually had programming skills. Same gig though. Set a programming assignment that's way too hard for the class, because they hadn't been taught programming properly (in this case, implement a few simple graph algos so hardly Firefox 0-day level). Realize too late that nobody can pass the assignment and retroactively change the marking criteria to be entirely based on writeup. Result: as one of the only people in the class who actually submitted the full three working solutions, I got one of the lowest grades, because "You explained the algorithm in 'detailed code comments'? Do you think I have time to read student's code? It needed to be submitted in a Word document alongside the submission." This was at a UK Russell Group university, supposedly one of the elite. IMO universities are jokes. They were crap at teaching decades ago and that was before they were overrun with radical ideological activism. They're simply good at hiding the truth because academics are treated like gods - nobody believes students who say their teachers are terrible at their own subjects.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  I'd stick up for my CompSci at my "liberal arts college" education, but that was, like 25 years ago. "University" typically means TAs the entire undergrad, right?

coldtea 5y ago

>Wow that sounds like a really frustrating and demotivating experience. Seems totally ridiculous and beyond any realistic expectations What, the 3 hour compile time? That's an OS+utils, there are projects that take more... Ever tried compiling QT+KDE?

pjmlp 5y ago
Back in the SuSE 6.3 days that would take a whole night.
- brimble 5y ago
  Old Gentoo user chiming in. My "I won't be using my computer today" builds were either major desktop environment (or anything that forced me to rebuild the GTK or QT shared libs), and... OpenOffice. Good lord, that one took forever. Firefox probably came next after those.
  - mindentropy 5y ago
    Oh man I was a Gentoo user once. That was funny and brought a lot of memories back. I was building KDE from source and it took 1.5 days to build I think lol.
joezydeco 5y ago
Try Yocto with Qt. Ugh. I have a 48-core server just for this task.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  How are you building your Qt ? I just tested on my machine (i7-6900k, 8C/16T from 6 years ago), building 5.15: qtbase, qtdeclarative, graphicaleffects,multimedia,quick controls2, serial port, svg, wayland and websockets takes 8 minutes total... it's hardly the end of the world and that's already more than needed for 99.9% of Qt apps. And I don't even use ccache. make -j16 5343,12s user 307,95s system 1198% cpu 7:51,67 total here's my configure line: ~/libs/qt5/configure -nomake tests -nomake examples -debug -confirm-license -opensource -platform linux-clang -linker lld
  - joezydeco 5y ago
    Oh sure, building an isolated Qt instance is quick. But adding the Yocto overhead (entire bootloader, kernel, and then fetch/decompress/build all the packages) takes a bit more time. And Qwebkit isn't trivial either. Once Yocto has it all in sstate-cache then it's only like 15 minutes for a total rebuild.
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      yeah, if you need webkit that's much longer for sure.

native_samples 5y ago

I guess it must be common. I had a very similar experience at university except without the fillip of lecturers who actually had programming skills. Same gig though. Set a programming assignment that's way too hard for the class, because they hadn't been taught programming properly (in this case, implement a few simple graph algos so hardly Firefox 0-day level). Realize too late that nobody can pass the assignment and retroactively change the marking criteria to be entirely based on writeup. Result: as one of the only people in the class who actually submitted the full three working solutions, I got one of the lowest grades, because "You explained the algorithm in 'detailed code comments'? Do you think I have time to read student's code? It needed to be submitted in a Word document alongside the submission." This was at a UK Russell Group university, supposedly one of the elite. IMO universities are jokes. They were crap at teaching decades ago and that was before they were overrun with radical ideological activism. They're simply good at hiding the truth because academics are treated like gods - nobody believes students who say their teachers are terrible at their own subjects.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
I'd stick up for my CompSci at my "liberal arts college" education, but that was, like 25 years ago. "University" typically means TAs the entire undergrad, right?