Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor • Hacker News Board

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#101

Post by blahedo » Fri, Jan 02, 2015, 7:17 PM UTC

Carrok wrote: post #97

cbhl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me that there are college-level CS instructors who haven't heard of RPN before -- my high school CS teacher had us write an RPN calculator. That said, I can see an argument that an RPN calculator "trivializes" the assignment compared to an infix calculator, especially if the latter was supposed to do order-of-operations.

I've been a senior developer for almost a decade now. I've never heard of RPN. Not everyone took the same classes you did, get off your high-horse.

You could certainly be a software developer, and a reasonably competent one, without having heard of RPN. I would argue that it's harder to be a computer scientist---and shocking to manage to get to the PhD level in computer science---without having at least a little exposure to RPN: it's a classic example of stack manipulation and has important theoretical relevance to programming language theory and compiler design.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#102

Post by jarin » Fri, Jan 02, 2015, 8:04 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #12

Generally if you can pull that off you are way past the course material :-) I had a FORTRAN problem which asked to print the current bowling score given a series of numbers between 0 and 10 (number of pins knocked down) and I had it print out spares as '/' and strikes as 'X' and it didn't print the actual score until you didn't get a strike (as is the custom on bowling.) and the TA complained. (the assignment was to…

I was taking a beginner Java class (had to use up that GI Bill), and the final assignment was to make a simple "gas pump" program that tallied up the total price and printed a receipt.

I wrote up a pretty simple implementation and realized I had 50 minutes left to sit around, so I started refactoring it into classes and writing unit tests. I was pretty happy with the result, but I turned in both versions just in case I would get docked for not following the instructions exactly.

Got a B. Other people in the class who did a straight imperative style got As.

This is what computer science instruction is like at a for-profit college.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#103

Post by yebyen » Sat, Jan 03, 2015, 12:50 AM UTC

Carrok wrote: post #97

cbhl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me that there are college-level CS instructors who haven't heard of RPN before -- my high school CS teacher had us write an RPN calculator. That said, I can see an argument that an RPN calculator "trivializes" the assignment compared to an infix calculator, especially if the latter was supposed to do order-of-operations.

I've been a senior developer for almost a decade now. I've never heard of RPN. Not everyone took the same classes you did, get off your high-horse.

While it is true that for every thing that anyone says "everyone knows" at any given time in the world, 250 people are being born every minute on average. I think you know where I'm going... those people don't know anything, so it's clear that some much larger fraction of the general population don't know that thing.

I am personally doubly surprised as GP to find two people in a discussion about Computer Science at a college level that have not heard of RPN before. For what it's worth!

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#104

Post by sleepychu » Sat, Jan 03, 2015, 12:04 PM UTC

Carrok wrote: post #97

cbhl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me that there are college-level CS instructors who haven't heard of RPN before -- my high school CS teacher had us write an RPN calculator. That said, I can see an argument that an RPN calculator "trivializes" the assignment compared to an infix calculator, especially if the latter was supposed to do order-of-operations.

I've been a senior developer for almost a decade now. I've never heard of RPN. Not everyone took the same classes you did, get off your high-horse.

Does the expansion of the initialisation help? Reverse Polish Notation.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#105

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Jan 03, 2015, 12:51 PM UTC

Carrok wrote: post #97

cbhl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me that there are college-level CS instructors who haven't heard of RPN before -- my high school CS teacher had us write an RPN calculator. That said, I can see an argument that an RPN calculator "trivializes" the assignment compared to an infix calculator, especially if the latter was supposed to do order-of-operations.

I've been a senior developer for almost a decade now. I've never heard of RPN. Not everyone took the same classes you did, get off your high-horse.

He was talking about college level CS instructors, not about developers, senior or otherwise.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#106

Post by xorcist » Sat, Jan 03, 2015, 4:00 PM UTC

Carrok wrote: post #97

cbhl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me that there are college-level CS instructors who haven't heard of RPN before -- my high school CS teacher had us write an RPN calculator. That said, I can see an argument that an RPN calculator "trivializes" the assignment compared to an infix calculator, especially if the latter was supposed to do order-of-operations.

I've been a senior developer for almost a decade now. I've never heard of RPN. Not everyone took the same classes you did, get off your high-horse.

If you have taken engineering at a college level you probably least bumped into a handheld HP calculator at least once.

If you have taken an introduction to the Unix/Linux shell, you most probably saw the dc command.

Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor

#107

Post by bborud » Sat, Jan 03, 2015, 4:46 PM UTC

jacalata wrote: post #76

MichaelGG wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. When I interviewed at MS, education never came up at all. Just lots of algorithms questions, from ~9am to 7 in the evening. I was about 24 at the time. I wouldn't ditch GPA for no reason, but avoiding a bad professor and getting a good one seems far more valuable overall.

I'm assuming you sent in some kind of paperwork before walking up and interviewing - did that perhaps include a resume with a GPA on it?

When I was asked to send my resume to Google I fired up Emacs, wrote one page of previous positions and what I worked on there, and one page on what my interests are. Both professional and spare time interests. I spent about 15 minutes writing that resume, read through it once and then emailed it to Alan Eustace.

I don't remember if I even mentioned which university I had attended and whether or not I had finished a degree. Nor did I make a single mention of what programming languages I know or any of the tedious stuff people tend to use for bulking up their CV.

(I was told that Jeff Dean, who was one of my interviewers, said that he couldn't wait to meet someone who writes software, races cars, welds and has just finished a course in logging timber using an good old-fashioned chainsaw)