Back to school…

I’m back at university, in an effort to force myself to knuckle down and get through the pain of learning Java. It’s been 16 years since I was last there, and here are a few of the things I’ve learned so far –

I’ve learned about the syllabus
Despite the move to Java, very little has changed in the overall teaching approach in 16 years. I’ve heard from another source that someone in my position 15 years ago may have been saying the same thing.

I’ve learned something about gold-plating
University seems to reward you for adding extra features. This doesn’t seem to happen in the business world.

A couple of years ago, I had a graduate developer assigned to my test team to help extend a test tool that I had written. He seemed overly focused on wanting to build a GUI for my tool, when a simple command-line interface was all that was needed to solve our problem. Similarly, with a user base of three, robust error handling was something we could live without. After a couple of semesters of university assignments, I think I understand why this was the case.

I’ve learned something about testing
Lecturers are mostly not embracing some of the not-so-recent trends. I’ve found JUnit tests a boon on assignments where we are incrementally adding new features. Having these tests as I implement existing functions using newly-learned language features, or to add new functionality for new assignments makes things much less stressful. Implement a test per requirement also helps to make sure I get all the marks for the assignment as well. When I suggested a student learn JUnit rather than passing parameters to their classes manually via a GUI interface, lecturers seemed against it, despite the many practical (and career) benefits.

I’ve learned something about learning
University seems really keen to have students build GUIs on everything. Now, GUI building seems like a reasonably complex thing, object-wise. As a beginner, figuring out how to model the domain is hard enough without being forced to put a hacky user interface on top of it.

Learning to model a domain doesn’t start with modelling the user interface.

I’m sure there are more progressive courses out there. I’m just surprised that the take-up of things that are of much benefit to beginning programmers is coming along so slowly. But then we are always making a tradeoff between what we can easily teach and what’s worth teaching. Just look at tester certification.