What!? I’m sorry, transistors are made of gates? lol This guy obviously never took a real hardware course in his life. If you can’t buy them at the store then what in the hell is the Ti 7400 series!?

He makes a couple of decent points but its shrouded with bag grammar and personal biasing. This guy sounds like some kind of code monkey that would be better suited for technical school and not a real University.

As much as I try to get rid of Windows I always go back, I love linux but I don’t know if will ever be good for the regular user.

C++ to Java and other object-oriented or scripting languages isn’t so bad, but try Prolog and LISP.

I know a kid studying CS now and he is having issues with binary and I told him that he doesn’t need to really know that just get past it and forget it, it is redundant to modern Programmers.

Just as a small insider, in my university (which shall remain unnamed) our VB.NET programming teacher is such a bloody genius he wrote in nice big font on the projector Dim Integer as Integer and couldn’t figure out what the problem was for about half an hour.

But when i wrote a string to 7-bit octet text conversion function (the one used to convert string to SMS PDU format) i got a 60 in my report because, and i quote “you did not use arrays in your code”. Then what the bloody hell do you consider a string when i refer to it with brackets (or parentheses in the case of VB) …. IDIOT!

You touch on some interessting points, but are not quite right in all of them. Let me take your “misconceptions” one at a time.

1. Java – you are absolutely right, Java is a complicated first language. Python og Ruby would be better to learn about variables and programflow. However Java is much better than C or C++, and it has an immediate “real-world” feeling, since the students can actually see it being used and requested by the industry.

2. Machine Language – when we say that it is “basic”, or low-level, we mean from the computers point of view, not from the students. Machine Language is the basic “workhorse” in the computer, whereas high-level languages have to be compiled or interpreted. High-level are however easier to learn for humans …

3. Write code on paper – I’ve seen other instructors make this mistake too. The idea is that you write your program, not your code, on paper before sitting in front of the machine. Working with paper allows you to design your program, to think about the algorithm without all the nitty-gritty of the language you use. Experienced programmers can do it in their heads, or in comments, but students need yo use paper. Unfortunately some instructors seem to think that you need to write compilable code on paper, and that is indeed a bonehead misconception.

4. Lectures – you are absolutely right, you can only learn programming by programming.

5. Algorithm design – hmm, well, it IS a good idea to learn to read existing code, and to understand how they solve their problems. But it certainly isn’t for beginners.

6. Picking up other languages – I kind of agree. While it is informative to show students that they can learn a new language using the same principles they have already learned once, it always ends in confusion. In the long term you will pick this up by yourselves.

7. Exams – yeah, they are problematic, but we need some way to measure your individual understanding of the area. I would love to see some changes there, but haven’t the faintest idea as how it could be done better.

8. GUIs are tools of the API – like working with filesystems, XML, databases, encryption, sound, threads, networking etc. It is not part of learning to program, and it requires more learning a specific API, than learning basic theory, and I guess that is why it is often left to specialty courses. I would like to spend more time on GUI-programming, but it requires that you first understand basic programming, algorithm design, program flow, multithreading and event-controlled programmming.

9. Calculus – you are right, it doesn’t. Programming doesn’t require any specific math-skills, it only requires that you are logical and systematic – traits often seen in higher mathematics, but the connection between high-school math and programming is a nuisance that I would like to get rid of.

10 and 11 sounds like personal opinions, like whether Mac or Windows is best, and whether everyone should use Open Office or some other system. It is an endless debate, and no one is correct.

12. You are mistaken – or your professor has taught you poorly. Gates are built from transistors, and you can buy integrated circuits with four NAND, EXOR, AND og OR gates in them, and play around with at home. Boolean logic and how it is implemented in electronic circuits are a very important aspect of computer science, but maybe not so much in programming.