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Reduce complexity? In the second week of the course they removed the submission limit and doubled the submission window. The forum was a mass head scratching.

• the_af 13y ago
  (I didn't downvote you) I agree that the exercise from week 2 (the epidemy simulation) was a mess. It was barely about reactive programming though. The mess was introduced mostly because the exercise has lots of mutable state. That the tests cheated, bypassed the API and mutated the internal state of the simulation didn't help either. But I assumed one of the aims of this exercise was to show how mutable state can mess things up, even though this wasn't officially acknowledged by the staff. Your observation about Scala is unwarranted though. Nothing about the exercise's difficulty has to do with Scala. It's also not "too complex" or "academic". It's an extremely simplistic discrete event simulation of a disease, almost like a cellular automaton... How can this be "too complex"? A lot of the head scratching was caused because the course is open to anyone. This is a good thing, but it also means a lot of people taking the course barely have the fundamentals of programming down. If you read the forums, a lot of people don't know how to write test cases or debug code, for example. These people would have found almost any non-trivial exercise in any language difficult.