111–120 of 152 posts
I'm a student at the Paris 42 campus. It is not true that the average 42 student lack theoretical understanding. We may not take a semester long course in compiler theory for example, but we do manage to build our own shell scripting interpreters and pick up enough compiler theory to define a grammar, build a parser to produce an AST and then interpret it accordingly. The same goes for other theoretical foundations o…
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Yes, they modelled it after Epita which was also about code, code, code. Also, while it's nice that Xavier Niel finances a school that is free, most of the universities and Grandes Ecoles (where many developers graduate from) are also free, and financed with public money. They work great and produce really skilled developers and architects. The reality is that Xavier Niel didn't do a Grandes Ecoles, he's mostly self-…
> Yes, they modelled it after Epita which was also about code, code, code. I don't know where you last got your information about Epita, but this has been less and less true for around 10 years now. They sought to have a state certified engineering degree for a long time and implemented a lot of changes around 2003-2007 that made the cursus a bit less about code a more about common engineering stuff (maths, physics,…
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> To me, this is as silly as training Biathlon athletes to not even aim before they shoot. People should learn this mantra: coding is to software development what moving pieces is to chess.
Yes, and chess teachers will tell you, the way to improve as a beginner is through playing many many games quickly to get a wide variety of exposure and start developing intuition.
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You forgot to mention the private schools are expensive and use a somewhat pyramidal scheme where older students teach newer ones to repaid part of their school fees. In public education all teachers hold PhD or engineer titles so they have more years to think about what they teach than the guy who is only year+2 of the teachee. Edit: I checked Epitech tuition fees, it's around 40k€ for the whole 5 years curriculum.…
Something interesting is that the way Epitech (and 42) work is completely different from what you would have in public schools (at least in France). For example, one key part for me was that the school allowed me to practically don't go to classes as long as I could prove that my work wasn't affected. It's something that you won't find everyday. I'm 100% sure I'd have failed university otherwise because the lack of f…
I have no doubt some younger people, competitive alpha minds would take this in their stride, but I worry this culture of hyper competitiveness permeates into employment. When this stuff is accepted as 'work ethic' and normalized you tilt toward what some asian cultures are experiencing today - producing overworked unhappy individuals.
Personally I don't think it's great to brag about how hard you work. I don't think it's ok to be proud of bootcamps (although 42 School explicitly says it's not a boot camp which is a little Orwellian). People should be proud of being healthy, getting enough sleep, eating well, having social interactions, learning, cultivating well balanced meaningful lives.
To truly be a school of the 21st century we need to do away with this culture of stress. It's killing the best of us.
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> Quite honestly, most companies don't care about one's compiler theory knowledge or ability to build shell scripting interpreters, nor should they. Right. Like how you don't care about the persons' physics knowledge when hiring an architect. /s
No. Like you don't care about one's ability to make some concrete when hiring an architect. It's nice to have, might be essential on some specific projects. Usually won't matter.
Yes, you can hire him, but that will cost you lot of money. There are tons of examples of cheap architect work, e.g. collapsed bridges in the Western Europe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/91bjlr/sc...
That being said I met some super smart people from 42 that had built extremely interesting and technically challenging projects! For example a first year student I met had built a 3d rendering engine in C without using any external library.
Having interviewed a bunch of 42 graduates, my main issue with 42 is that it doesn't teach their students to think about what they're doing, encouraging them instead to rush to the keyboard and emit as much code as they can as if programming for the last day of their project. This seems to resonate well with the culture of piscines at 42. To me, this is as silly as training Biathlon athletes to not even aim before th…
encouraging them instead to rush to the keyboard and emit as much code as they can as if programming for the last day of their project I believe this is a good method for beginners. A beginner doesn't need to think much because he/she doesn't have the material/experience for that anyway, but instead just practice as much as possible. Later, he/she will reflects on what he/she think he knows and get a more structured…
I dug up some really old notes that referenced my reasoning for the name.
"42 is the number used to define the meaning of life, learning is also arguably the meaning of life. It also sounds like school for 2 (teacher & student). This will hopefully help one to one learning."
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Depending on the problem, I disagree with this idea "think before you code". I think /by/ coding, sometimes a problem is too big to fit into my head and if I write some code and try to string it together the code will tell me where my mental concept is missing something. If the real underlying problem/solution is a shape too big to put in your head, what do you propose? Pen and paper as superior to code for modelling…
I never wrote "think before you code", and agree that's not always the most suitable way to go about a problem, although I believe a lot of programmers would benefit from doing that more often. I wrote "think about what you're doing".
It comes through in the code, it's messy, there are entire classes and functions that are never used. The logic is all over the place. The code is messy to look at. There are edge cases that haven't been handled.
Well engineered code I should be able to look at understand what the developers thought process was as he was writing it.
I've seen a Dev write a piece of code, that wasn't that big, maybe a few hundred lines then later that day he couldn't explain how it worked in a meeting. Even going through his code line by line he couldn't follow what was happening.
If he can't follow what is happening in his code or explain it coherently, how can anyone else!
And it was because he dived into coding something without thinking.