If you haven't tried finding an internship in CS/CE, I suggest trying to find one.
Real-world CS is a lot different than academia. I'm a junior (CE @ UM Ann Arbor) in college, and while I've liked some of my classes, most of them are merely there to teach the rigor of heavy computer science, so that we have the faculties to tackle the really cool problems in computing. Some people actually like the academia-side more... but those people are crazy (j/k).
The real place where I have fun is my job - not as theoretical as class, and you see real results. The most fun is when you get to actually *use* the stuff that they teach you in class.
Give it a while - and if you can't find an internship in your area, often CS departments have programming clubs, in which the members work on a large computer project together. Personally, I'm not involved with one of these, but it seems everyone involved has a lot of fun.
Good Luck, and remember - when all else fails, stay for a master's degree.
Ugh! Me too!!!
I have a philosophy midterm today, and an algorithms midterm tomorrow!!!
id really needs to poll students to find out when the best time for major releases should be:P
Re:Why are /.'ers even READING Cringely?!?!
on
C# To Crush Java?
·
· Score: 1
Quoting...
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Next.. Let's talk about the creator of C#, Anders.. aka the near killer of Borland Pascal. This guy doesn't have a CLUE about what makes object-oriented languages truly functional. And perfect examples *include* Delphi and C#. Delphi is finally becoming a 'real' OO language *since* his exit from Borland. And what does he do when he first get's to Microsoft? He makes ANOTHER Delphi - including all it's early shortcomings as a developing language, but changes the Pascal syntax for C syntax. The end result is a language (based on C) that is effectively castrated of it's most graceful and useful (C-specific) features. Ander's did you learn nothing from your years at Borland?
---------------
Delphi/Object Pascal happens to be one of the largest non-MS languages/environments that gets used in a business environment. In my opinion, it is designed quite well, and has been for years. It optimizes quite well, and creates really fast code. The reason MS hired Anders was b/c he was responsible for parts of the language that worked very well in practice, not just in theory.
As for nobody writing a C# compiler for GNU/Linux, check out go-mono.com.
At many universities, including U of M (the school I go to), an engineering major requires that you take one upper-level technical communication course. I'm actually taking this now, and our first assignment was to write a resume. The other things you mention were also covered, albeit very briefly. You are required to take this class as an upper-classman, so it kind of prepares you for the "real world".
Wordpad is their major text/rtf/unicode editor now. Notepad is meant to be really light. Wordpad has a decent amount of features, but I really don't like the feel of it.
For a great text editor under windows try UltraEdit32. It does text, hex, large files, UNIX DOS/CPM conversions, and a bunch of other cool stuff, including syntax highlighting for c, c++, java, html, etc. Check it out at www.ultraedit.com. It's the only shareware I've ever paid for:)
Well, as I said in my original post, I've only had the beta for a little bit. One thing I can definately say is that the GUI elements aren't slow like Swing/AWT. I've written a ton of java, both in industry and University, and I can rightfully say that one of the reasons that I don't use it any more is their poor UI speed. And, as a side note, I do do a ton of work with FFTs, actually. I work for a company that does FFT analysis of a library of over 3-million pieces of music. I happen to be the lead coder on this project, and I am excited to see that using MIT's FFTW library (a great library for those of you who are unfamiliar w/ FFTs) from C# will be as simple as a few dll function imports.
I notice with some amusement that three of the four data sources you mention are MS databases
I believe they support any ODBC connection... the support newsgroups are full of people connecting MySQL and DB2 to.NET. Since our company uses primarily FoxPro 2x files, and a little bit of MSSQL, I have little need to connect to anything else; I'm glad that the possibility exists though.
And what does "nearly native access to MSSQL" mean exactly?
Sorry, this was a bit unclear. It means that ADO.NET adds a very thin layer between native MSSQL (or any OLE DB source) and your code. This is much faster than ODBC; since I do a lot of database work, this is very important to me.
MS fanboys (or trolls) are always so amusing...
Hey, I take the product that lets me get a quality application out the door the fastest. For most of my business coding this has been Delphi (75% of my coding these days). Since at heart I'm a C++ programmer, it's nice to see a *beautifull* RAD development suite that also allows me to write really efficient C++ stlye code. Whether it be Microsoft, Borland, or any one else, I'll be glad to hand them a few thousand dollars for tools that will save me tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in saved time.
I have been playing around with the beta of Visual Studio.NET for the past week or so.
The main advantages I see are in these areas:
1.) speed - VC# is a LOT faster than Java. I notice no difference between native C++ and JIT translated C#.
2.) ease of use - it takes about 6 _mouse-clicks_ to connect your code to a data source (oracle, mssql, Access, FoxPro, etc...), and VC# is very programmer-friendly
3.) *amazing* IDE and dev tools
4.) ADO.NET allows nearly native access to MSSQL and various other DB's.
As a programmer, I am really happy to have dev tools that allow me to write my apps in 1/10th the time, and still have them run just as fast, sometimes a lot faster. I think microsoft realizes that the key to their continued hyper-success is making it really easy for developers to build great solutions.
When I started out at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2 years ago, I'm a junior now), we had a class called "Introduction to Computer Engineering (EECS100)". This class started off with LC2 (the "little computer 2": a simple, made-up processor) machine and assembly language, and progressed to C. When writing our first C programs, we also had to convert them to LC2 assembly language. This class gave us a *great* introduction to computer science; now even those who came into the University knowing nothing had a pretty good grasp of how programming languages work. This class is quickly followed by EECS 280, a C++ class, that taught higher-level programming.
I think this is a great way of doing things. It's my opinion that if CS/CE students do not grasp the fundamental nature of languages at an early stage, their learning in the future will be inhibited. Donald Knuth says, in "The Art of Computer Programming", something close to "Anyone who has more than a casual intrest in computers should learn an assembly language for at least one machine".
The thing that convinced me of the above point was the fact that later on, in EECS380 (an algorithms class), the students who had taken EECS100 instead of the new watered-down equivalent (EECS180, Intro to C++) were always at the top of the code execution speed rankings (with few exceptions).
Unfortunately, EECS100 was removed from the curriculum as of this upcoming year; too many students were failing (sometimes around 40%). Though I think that it is a good thing to weed out those who don't breathe computers (it gets rid of the students who are in it just for the money), the UM CE department thought that this was discouraging to beginning students.
Mike Feldkamp
Programmer, All Media Guide (http://www.allmediaguide.com)
Remove the stars to email me:
m*i*k*e*f*e*l*d*@*e*n*g*i*n*.*u*m*i*c*h*.*e*d*u
Slashdot Mirror
Who would win in a fight? You, Alan Cox, or Linus?
If you haven't tried finding an internship in CS/CE, I suggest trying to find one.
Real-world CS is a lot different than academia. I'm a junior (CE @ UM Ann Arbor) in college, and while I've liked some of my classes, most of them are merely there to teach the rigor of heavy computer science, so that we have the faculties to tackle the really cool problems in computing. Some people actually like the academia-side more... but those people are crazy (j/k).
The real place where I have fun is my job - not as theoretical as class, and you see real results. The most fun is when you get to actually *use* the stuff that they teach you in class.
Give it a while - and if you can't find an internship in your area, often CS departments have programming clubs, in which the members work on a large computer project together. Personally, I'm not involved with one of these, but it seems everyone involved has a lot of fun.
Good Luck, and remember - when all else fails, stay for a master's degree.
-Mike
Ugh! Me too!!!
:P
I have a philosophy midterm today, and an algorithms midterm tomorrow!!!
id really needs to poll students to find out when the best time for major releases should be
Quoting...
---------------
Next.. Let's talk about the creator of C#, Anders.. aka the near killer of Borland Pascal. This guy doesn't have a CLUE about what makes object-oriented languages truly functional. And perfect examples *include* Delphi and C#. Delphi is finally becoming a 'real' OO language *since* his exit from Borland. And what does he do when he first get's to Microsoft? He makes ANOTHER Delphi - including all it's early shortcomings as a developing language, but changes the Pascal syntax for C syntax. The end result is a language (based on C) that is effectively castrated of it's most graceful and useful (C-specific) features. Ander's did you learn nothing from your years at Borland?
---------------
Delphi/Object Pascal happens to be one of the largest non-MS languages/environments that gets used in a business environment. In my opinion, it is designed quite well, and has been for years. It optimizes quite well, and creates really fast code. The reason MS hired Anders was b/c he was responsible for parts of the language that worked very well in practice, not just in theory.
As for nobody writing a C# compiler for GNU/Linux, check out go-mono.com.
At many universities, including U of M (the school I go to), an engineering major requires that you take one upper-level technical communication course. I'm actually taking this now, and our first assignment was to write a resume. The other things you mention were also covered, albeit very briefly. You are required to take this class as an upper-classman, so it kind of prepares you for the "real world".
ROFL!!!!
Yes, I know this is off topic, sorry :)
:)
Wordpad is their major text/rtf/unicode editor now. Notepad is meant to be really light. Wordpad has a decent amount of features, but I really don't like the feel of it.
For a great text editor under windows try UltraEdit32. It does text, hex, large files, UNIX DOS/CPM conversions, and a bunch of other cool stuff, including syntax highlighting for c, c++, java, html, etc. Check it out at www.ultraedit.com. It's the only shareware I've ever paid for
What does "a LOT faster than Java" mean?
.NET. Since our company uses primarily FoxPro 2x files, and a little bit of MSSQL, I have little need to connect to anything else; I'm glad that the possibility exists though.
Well, as I said in my original post, I've only had the beta for a little bit. One thing I can definately say is that the GUI elements aren't slow like Swing/AWT. I've written a ton of java, both in industry and University, and I can rightfully say that one of the reasons that I don't use it any more is their poor UI speed. And, as a side note, I do do a ton of work with FFTs, actually. I work for a company that does FFT analysis of a library of over 3-million pieces of music. I happen to be the lead coder on this project, and I am excited to see that using MIT's FFTW library (a great library for those of you who are unfamiliar w/ FFTs) from C# will be as simple as a few dll function imports.
I notice with some amusement that three of the four data sources you mention are MS databases
I believe they support any ODBC connection... the support newsgroups are full of people connecting MySQL and DB2 to
And what does "nearly native access to MSSQL" mean exactly?
Sorry, this was a bit unclear. It means that ADO.NET adds a very thin layer between native MSSQL (or any OLE DB source) and your code. This is much faster than ODBC; since I do a lot of database work, this is very important to me.
MS fanboys (or trolls) are always so amusing...
Hey, I take the product that lets me get a quality application out the door the fastest. For most of my business coding this has been Delphi (75% of my coding these days). Since at heart I'm a C++ programmer, it's nice to see a *beautifull* RAD development suite that also allows me to write really efficient C++ stlye code. Whether it be Microsoft, Borland, or any one else, I'll be glad to hand them a few thousand dollars for tools that will save me tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in saved time.
I have been playing around with the beta of Visual Studio.NET for the past week or so. The main advantages I see are in these areas: 1.) speed - VC# is a LOT faster than Java. I notice no difference between native C++ and JIT translated C#. 2.) ease of use - it takes about 6 _mouse-clicks_ to connect your code to a data source (oracle, mssql, Access, FoxPro, etc...), and VC# is very programmer-friendly 3.) *amazing* IDE and dev tools 4.) ADO.NET allows nearly native access to MSSQL and various other DB's. As a programmer, I am really happy to have dev tools that allow me to write my apps in 1/10th the time, and still have them run just as fast, sometimes a lot faster. I think microsoft realizes that the key to their continued hyper-success is making it really easy for developers to build great solutions.
When I started out at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2 years ago, I'm a junior now), we had a class called "Introduction to Computer Engineering (EECS100)". This class started off with LC2 (the "little computer 2": a simple, made-up processor) machine and assembly language, and progressed to C. When writing our first C programs, we also had to convert them to LC2 assembly language. This class gave us a *great* introduction to computer science; now even those who came into the University knowing nothing had a pretty good grasp of how programming languages work. This class is quickly followed by EECS 280, a C++ class, that taught higher-level programming.
I think this is a great way of doing things. It's my opinion that if CS/CE students do not grasp the fundamental nature of languages at an early stage, their learning in the future will be inhibited. Donald Knuth says, in "The Art of Computer Programming", something close to "Anyone who has more than a casual intrest in computers should learn an assembly language for at least one machine".
The thing that convinced me of the above point was the fact that later on, in EECS380 (an algorithms class), the students who had taken EECS100 instead of the new watered-down equivalent (EECS180, Intro to C++) were always at the top of the code execution speed rankings (with few exceptions).
Unfortunately, EECS100 was removed from the curriculum as of this upcoming year; too many students were failing (sometimes around 40%). Though I think that it is a good thing to weed out those who don't breathe computers (it gets rid of the students who are in it just for the money), the UM CE department thought that this was discouraging to beginning students.
Mike Feldkamp
Programmer, All Media Guide (http://www.allmediaguide.com)
Remove the stars to email me:
m*i*k*e*f*e*l*d*@*e*n*g*i*n*.*u*m*i*c*h*.*e*d*u