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Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

#21
post #9

Probably compiler class focused on the theory aspect of it. It was much more interesting/useful the other compiler class I took which actually had me create a parser+compiler for a made-up language. Still somewhat challenging to think in that way, as it's not the usual way to process data.

Why was the theory more interesting? I didnt enjoy it at all nor found it very useful, meanwhile practice was really useful and satisfying

I said that the practical was better for me. The theory killed me.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

#22
I don't know how much this applies to other institutions, but speaking personally, my undergrad Operating Systems course very much threw the students to the wolves.

It wasn't one of those "memorize the textbook and you'll be fine" type of classes. It was a "do a bunch of independent research and figure a whole lot of things out for yourself" type of class.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

#25
A course on abstract interpretation [1], taught by Radhia [2] and Patrick [2] Cousot at ENS in 1989. To my shame, I must admit that I didn't appreciate it at the time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_interpretation

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhia_Cousot

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Cousot

Re: Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

#26

I don't know how much this applies to other institutions, but speaking personally, my undergrad Operating Systems course very much threw the students to the wolves. It wasn't one of those "memorize the textbook and you'll be fine" type of classes. It was a "do a bunch of independent research and figure a whole lot of things out for yourself" type of class.

Same here. After doing Java the entire first year, the second year we did a 6-hour course for C, and then had to write a ram-disk for a toy Linux operating system. We had to write the code, compile, boot in the new system, run a specific test suite, and repeat till the test passed. I am still not sure how we got the tests to pass, but I remember praying to the computer gods at one point, as well as a bunch of boot&hope development.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

#28

I don't know how much this applies to other institutions, but speaking personally, my undergrad Operating Systems course very much threw the students to the wolves. It wasn't one of those "memorize the textbook and you'll be fine" type of classes. It was a "do a bunch of independent research and figure a whole lot of things out for yourself" type of class.

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

#29
The title asks specifically for a programming course but the post text says not to limit to programming courses. It's a little confusing.

Programming is something you will get better at as you do it, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. Instead I would look for computer science courses that interest you and a course outside of comp sci that requires a lot of writing. Although technical writing is probably what you will be mostly doing, consider taking a creative writing or a critical reading course.

Re: Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?

#30
post #20

Logical programming (prolog). I'm not sure I would call it the most challenging class, but it's the one where the most amount of people failed to learn anything. If I had to guess then 90% of the students (or more) ended up not being able to do anything with prolog. I haven't seen any other class that had such an abysmally low rate of successful learning. I think the only knowledge most people took away from this cla…

I second this. One could say that advanced type-level programming is harder to understand, for sure, but in Prolog you can be lost at the very first step, feeling completely stupid for not being able to express the simplest thing (while already being very comfortable with C-style languages).
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