6 ms·

oh man, this was part of my intro to operating systems programming (not that I have a clue what I'm doing) in school 13 years ago. a month or two of "os" work i

oh man, this was part of my intro to operating systems programming (not that I have a clue what I'm doing) in school 13 years ago. a month or two of "os" work in a simulated kernel on the JVM, and then in the last 3 or 4 weeks the professor hit me with "here's minix, play with some these changes for homework", and then the final exam was "make these changes to the filesystem module". Worst I ever did in a CS class. I did not deserve whatever grade he gave me, but I was the only person that stuck it out and didn't drop the class.

lloydatkinson 4y ago
Sometimes the disconnect between what is taught and what is expected by lecturers in assignments is very big, don't feel too bad! It could be because they are coming at it from the "experts bubble" (I'm sure someone will know the proper name) where they can't conceive of the types of problems someone coming at it with no experience will encounter. Going from a tiny "hello world" OS you've made by following instructions and notes to being dropped into a totally different codebase that uses probably entirely different patterns and conventions seems a little unfair. It's like expecting someone who has played around with some graphics API for drawing pixels to expecting them to make changes to the DirectX shader compiler. I had a similar experience - a totally new professor gave us a about 5 lectures on parsers, compilers, AST's, BNF etc, and then just expected us to design a whole language that would be compiled to C for the assignment, using classic tools like yacc etc. For reference, the average programming ability of the students in the class was "What's a switch statement?". Absolutely everybody failed to achieve anything, and the only reason I even passed it was because I took an example language the professor provided and reviewed it and stated how I would liked the language to work instead. It's all a bit absurd.
- kif 4y ago
  > It could be because they are coming at it from the "experts bubble" I believe you mean the curse of knowledge [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
  - pxc 4y ago
    I've had a professor tell the class, in a relatively rare and small course: > I've been doing this so long that I can't remember which things are easy and hard to pick up for the first time, so you all will have to tell me— if you don't ask questions after each reading, I won't know what to reinforce and you will be lost. I think that's how it goes for classes that are not frequently taught or haven't been taught before, in almost any subject area.
- jdc0589 4y ago
  ironically, the same professor taught a compilers class and did a FANTASTIC job with it. We did pascal (probably a subset of the language, cant remember) and then c--. we did an interpreter + runtime for one, and compilation to some sort of bytecode for the other. dont remember which was which.
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    The same professor?
    - jdc0589 4y ago
      yep

lloydatkinson 4y ago

Sometimes the disconnect between what is taught and what is expected by lecturers in assignments is very big, don't feel too bad! It could be because they are coming at it from the "experts bubble" (I'm sure someone will know the proper name) where they can't conceive of the types of problems someone coming at it with no experience will encounter. Going from a tiny "hello world" OS you've made by following instructions and notes to being dropped into a totally different codebase that uses probably entirely different patterns and conventions seems a little unfair. It's like expecting someone who has played around with some graphics API for drawing pixels to expecting them to make changes to the DirectX shader compiler. I had a similar experience - a totally new professor gave us a about 5 lectures on parsers, compilers, AST's, BNF etc, and then just expected us to design a whole language that would be compiled to C for the assignment, using classic tools like yacc etc. For reference, the average programming ability of the students in the class was "What's a switch statement?". Absolutely everybody failed to achieve anything, and the only reason I even passed it was because I took an example language the professor provided and reviewed it and stated how I would liked the language to work instead. It's all a bit absurd.

kif 4y ago
> It could be because they are coming at it from the "experts bubble" I believe you mean the curse of knowledge [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
- pxc 4y ago
  I've had a professor tell the class, in a relatively rare and small course: > I've been doing this so long that I can't remember which things are easy and hard to pick up for the first time, so you all will have to tell me— if you don't ask questions after each reading, I won't know what to reinforce and you will be lost. I think that's how it goes for classes that are not frequently taught or haven't been taught before, in almost any subject area.
jdc0589 4y ago
ironically, the same professor taught a compilers class and did a FANTASTIC job with it. We did pascal (probably a subset of the language, cant remember) and then c--. we did an interpreter + runtime for one, and compilation to some sort of bytecode for the other. dont remember which was which.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  The same professor?
  - jdc0589 4y ago
    yep