No it is not and most threads can not be put in pre-labeled boxes, if you do you are the one doing the filtering with a preconception which says more about you than the thread. Can we continue on content.
All of this is very far from my original point that the purpose of homework is to solidify the student's understanding of the subject by having them apply what they have been taught in the form of solving problems. And that the benefit of homework is in direct proportion to the amount of effort the student puts into solving the problem without outside assistance.
I have this ridiculous expectation that an educated individual will understand logic at the subtlety of Plato, Locke, Hume, Kant and Camus, have mastery of applied mathematics such as differential equations and integral transforms and have a basic knowledge of chemistry, geology, biology and physics as taught in a 2-3 semester sequence in each making full use of mathematics where appropriate.
Furthermore, have the ability to write clearly and grammatically with proper punctuation and spelling, and not be so deluded as to think that they are right and everyone who disagrees with them is automatically wrong without any discussion.
That is the essence of a good liberal arts education. University has been degraded into an expensive vocational training program. It is still possible to get an education, but it now takes a lot more effort swimming against the current. How can anyone acquire the ability to make a critical analysis if opposing viewpoints are not permitted lest some poor soul be traumatized by exposure to a different viewpoint.
Engineers in particular, are inclined to sneer at liberal arts graduates. Certainly, there are many who receive liberal arts degrees without learning anything. Tertiary education is now a scam to defraud young people with false promises and convince them to enslave themselves with debt.
But:
We all get what we deserve whether we want it or not, either as individuals or as members of a group. Sometimes this is as punishment and sometimes it's a blessing. Which is always ambiguous and depends entirely on what we do next.
I rather suspect that a lot of university faculty and administrators will be quite dismayed when they discover that their pensions are dependent upon the financial well being of the students they have defrauded. As the saying goes, what goes around, comes around.
If I had to do my day job without being able to google stuff.... it would take 10-100 times longer to get anything done.
What I learnt at Uni is still partly valid, but significantly out of date. On a day by day basis I have to deal with problems that weren't even defined a month ago using technology that didn't exist a year ago.
The real painful ones are the ones so new, or so industry bespoke that you can't google them. Sometimes they don't even have proper documentation and your only course of action is to read the code.
This is to say that you can't learn everything in advance, what you need to have is a good problem solving strategy and be expecting to learn new things each and every day.
The really painful part in my trade is that resource managers take this a few steps too far. It's is extremely unpleasant to be assigned to a project as a consultant, the customer being charge $1000+ a day for your expertise when... in all reality, you didn't even know what technology existed until your manager told you what your next project would be.
Oh and a small story.
In the penultimate year of high school my attendance was around 15% and my presence in the "Technology" class was, literally 2 classes in that year. I showed up to the end of year exam and when marked it was 84%. The class went nuts and cried foul. How could I get 85% when I was never in school and had only attended 2 classes out about maybe 35? They demanded my paper be remarked. So... they remarked it, a different teacher gave me 86%. I didn't do a shred of homework or even a shred of class work. The material was just plainly obvious to me.
It was around the time I kinda realised where my career should be pointed.
Yebbut, there is little real fundamental change; it is mostly variations on a theme with some semantic sugar and a colour change.
Software language examples: C# is Java, Delphi is Pascal, Go's channels are from Hoare's CSP, Objective-C is Smalltalk.
Hardware examples: the myriad different MCUs, all programmed in C.
Yebbut, there is little real fundamental change; it is mostly variations on a theme with some semantic sugar and a colour change.
Software language examples: C# is Java, Delphi is Pascal, Go's channels are from Hoare's CSP, Objective-C is Smalltalk.
Hardware examples: the myriad different MCUs, all programmed in C.
No offence but this sounds like an opinion from the perspective of a low level programmer. No that domain hasn't changed much I agree. No matter what paradigm or trendy language you use it all boils down to basic Jackson structured programming at the end of the day.
The difficulties I am more referring to is the higher levels. Frameworks, platforms, AaaS, SaaS, PaaS, Cloud, Big Data, Clustering etc. Your education and experience allows you to read the documentation and be much faster at knowing what exactly to google and when, but each of these technologies introduces a lot of complexities and bespoke processes and nomenclature.
For example, if you were an experienced coder in C or Java and I sat you down to a project and said it was in a Big Data cluster using Kubernetes and Docker, running on a Hadoop cluster utilising Spark. There is very little a basic set of core programming experience will help you with there. Nothing is quite as it seems anymore and there is a whole new glossary of terms... trying to use it like a normal local application node will lead to pain.
You couldn't be more wrong, about me and about JSP.
I investigated JSP (and the other contemporary techniques) in the mid 80s, and rejected it as boring and not the way forward. My decisions and choices at that time have been proven correct.
You couldn't be more wrong, about me and about JSP.
I investigated JSP (and the other contemporary techniques) in the mid 80s, and rejected it as boring and not the way forward. My decisions and choices at that time have been proven correct.JSP was just another cult. People came back from the JSP courses like religious converts, but later realised they'd got very little from it. The mid 80s was a little late to be looking at Jackson, Yourdon, etc. They had already passed peak BS by then.
You couldn't be more wrong, about me and about JSP.
I investigated JSP (and the other contemporary techniques) in the mid 80s, and rejected it as boring and not the way forward. My decisions and choices at that time have been proven correct.JSP was just another cult. People came back from the JSP courses like religious converts, but later realised they'd got very little from it. The mid 80s was a little late to be looking at Jackson, Yourdon, etc. They had already passed peak BS by then.
And still people don't understand the "fallicies of distributed computing". They think because the framework documentation omits to mention them, the problems have been solved. Ha.
As for people understanding the limits defined by Lamport, or the Byzantine General's problems, or the split brain problem, they have no clue. They think FSMs are something to do with compilers.
You couldn't be more wrong, about me and about JSP.
I investigated JSP (and the other contemporary techniques) in the mid 80s, and rejected it as boring and not the way forward. My decisions and choices at that time have been proven correct.JSP was just another cult. People came back from the JSP courses like religious converts, but later realised they'd got very little from it. The mid 80s was a little late to be looking at Jackson, Yourdon, etc. They had already passed peak BS by then.
Em. All CPUs still function purely on JSP.
Sequence, selection, iteration.
At least that's what I took from my exposure to JSP.
Even a concept as ingrained as a C function has no real model in a CPU. The stack and branch operations required to deliver it in assembler are fabricated into sequence, selection and iteration operations.
That is what I meant by it not mattering what paradigm or language you use, it all ends up at basic JSP anyway.
Granted there is the rest of JSP stuff. It's been decades since I looked into it. Was it not just top down design? Modularise, divide and sub divide into smaller chunks to work with?
And still people don't understand the "fallicies of distributed computing". They think because the framework documentation omits to mention them, the problems have been solved. Ha.
As for people understanding the limits defined by Lamport, or the Byzantine General's problems, or the split brain problem, they have no clue. They think FSMs are something to do with compilers.
I suppose it depends on what you want to achieve by using distributed computing.
If you are simply in the "compute" space aiming for speed/throughput/latency it would be completely different to the scalability requirements and presenting dynamic platforms to allow basically architecture as a service. aka Kubernetes.
Similarly, the Big Data concepts in distributed computing have allowed data mining and processing on a different level which simply was not achievable until recently.
Maybe you mean the age old confusion that management might have that if 1 machine takes an hour to do a job that 2 machines will take half an hour. That's just management being fucking dumb. I don't think I have met a manager with a degree in anything related to management, so I normally treat them with caution ... tolerate them or use them to my advantage.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_structured_programming#JSP_and_object-oriented_design it does look boring and trivial, and it looks like you are right.
It seems as if I may have been thinking of JSD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_system_development
It has been a long time, and I've no regrets purging them from my memory
It's just like building muscle. No exercise, no muscle.
my favorite gripe. PROVE THAT (A+B)^2 IS A^2 + B^2 + 2AB
WHY ? This was proven thousands of years ago by some dude with a grey beard and a toga . It possible was also proven earlier by some dude from a place in the indus valley ( today's india) . All these years we have had millions of students posting the same proof.
Ar you as a math teacher still unsure about it that you need to ask your students to prove it once again ? IF you are so desperate why don't you prove it ?
Of course you need to know that formula. And it is nice to prove it while you are explaining it. But mindnumbingly asking the student to repeat that is parrot work. That equation can be looked up in a second. Teach them the applications !
Exams should be done by giving the student a book with all formulas. There is no reason to memorise all that stuff. There are students with bad memory skills that have excellent reasoning skills. They fail cause they can remember if it was Bob or Pete that came up with something. That is just plain wrong. Reasoning skill is waaaaay more important that being able to recant the coursebook letter for letter.
Feynman called that Cargocult Science. Go through the motions and you get the paper. But you are still the worlds biggest Moron.
my favorite gripe. PROVE THAT (A+B)^2 IS A^2 + B^2 + 2AB
WHY ? This was proven thousands of years ago by some dude with a grey beard and a toga . It possible was also proven earlier by some dude from a place in the indus valley ( today's india) . All these years we have had millions of students posting the same proof.
Ar you as a math teacher still unsure about it that you need to ask your students to prove it once again ? IF you are so desperate why don't you prove it ?
That is not learning. That is solving crossword puzzles and sudoku's.
Of course you need to know that formula. And it is nice to prove it while you are explaining it. But mindnumbingly asking the student to repeat that is parrot work. That equation can be looked up in a second. Teach them the applications !
Exams should be done by giving the student a book with all formulas. There is no reason to memorise all that stuff. There are students with bad memory skills that have excellent reasoning skills. They fail cause they can remember if it was Bob or Pete that came up with something. That is just plain wrong. Reasoning skill is waaaaay more important that being able to recant the coursebook letter for letter.
Feynman called that Cargocult Science. Go through the motions and you get the paper. But you are still the worlds biggest Moron.