George Files

Computer ‘Science’ in Chennai - Some misconceptions

Ah, computer science and IT, that holy sacred cow of learning in India, that everyone wants in on. Here’s a bunch of stuff which I think are misconceptions and why:

I like computers:

How cute. So you like chatting on the internet, wonderful! Oh you like playing games too, beautiful. And orkut, you use orkut all the time? And that’s why you ‘like computers’? Perfect! You could be the ideal employee, companies would die to pay someone like you to do all that for them. And if you don’t want to work under a company, spending your time chatting, playing games and browsing social networking sites is going to develop your computer skills. You’ll be the next big entrepreneur!

Sorry, no you won’t. That’s not even a half wit reason for doing a computer science course. But then, even if you were really into computer science, that’s not a good reason to do a computer science course here. Hell, even if you’re actually majoring in Math and want to actualyl do Computer Science, please please save yourself the trouble and do something simple like Statistics and learn a bunch of formulae to calculate regression coefficients and then learn Computer Science on your own. I’ll say why in the next bit.

Oh, a word in for parents here. Yeah, I know, my parents did it too and I grinned like an idiot. Alright parents, your kid isn’t a computer whiz kid because he’s figured out how to click through 4 dialog boxes in as many seconds to make marching red ants appear around your text in MS Word. He’s a glorified programmable calculator. Thank goodness my parents realised that soon enough, they don’t embarrass my brother like that.

Learning the Language isn’t learning the Science:

What a ridiculous concept! People sometimes tell me very proudly, “I know C, C++, [insert list of other languages here] .”, but they have no idea how to write any program other than what they were taught in school in anything other than Turbo C++ (which has it’s own little section later). All right, what’s going on here, fellas? Why are you claiming to know computer science when you’re just a bunch of walking, talking jargon dictionaries? Come on!

I have sympathy for those who say they’ve done Computer Science courses and come out none the wiser, they have no falsely inflated egos and they realise that they’re going to be software developers. They do their job and claim no credit that is not theirs.

This is linked to the bunch of people who say, “I like computer science, but I don’t like mathematics.” . Okay, all right, just what are you fellows trying to pull here, eh? Idiots. Am I supposed to be impressed that you can make Hello World programs in fourteen languages but don’t know what to do when the compiler reports a missing semi-colon in your c++ program? Yes yes, “compilerle problem irruku. ne onnu punna mudiyathu” . Also, a word in for a friend’s colleagues who go, “Where is Notepad?! How can I edit a text file?!”, use the program that’s labelled “Text Editor”. Yeah, I know, it’s not user friendly.

“Hey, give me C, machan .”

What is this, some kind of joke? I’ll trade you one C for one PHP, how’s that? You want me to give it away? Okay okay, this is about the Turbo C++ 3.0 compiler for DOS which everybody uses and which doesn’t compile ISO standard C++. Yes yes, we must all learn on a compiler that was made in 1991 and isn’t standard compliant, that’ll make us all exemplary software programmers. Hurray for you! And no, I don’t have Turbo C++. I’d tell you to use something else, but I know you’ll look at me blankly so I won’t try.

Computer ‘Science’ professors:

Oh god, there are so many of these. Their method of teaching is to read the textbook before the student and repeat it to him in class. This would make sense if they would atleast explain it in Tamil to those people who understand that much better in addition to speaking Broken English to all of us so that neither group understands. Yeah, yeah, I know, I don’t know enough to read the text book on my own.

Computer ‘Science’ question papers:

Sorry that my comments explained why a certain block of code was there and what it would do. I shall replace all that with little comments like /*Function Declaration*/ /*Function Call*/ /*Loop*/ as you asked me to. Thank you for scoring me, and so many of my classmates, so high for simply repeating what you dictated in class and also for scoring me high for those comments in my second test. It all evens out, doesn’t it?

Disclaimer: I’m no computer scientist. I use a computer and the little modifications I do make to source code consist of little stuff in open-source games like xevil for fun’s sake.

Posted by roshan.george under Internet, Madras, Tech |