• foonly (unregistered) in reply to cconroy
    cconroy:

    madjo:
    And we had a Java course given by someone who only had a minor understanding of Pascal, and called "sleep" functions "slape" and a 'thread' was pronounced as 'treat'. Mind you, this was on a Dutch school, so English might not have been his best side, but still "Slape"?

    Reminds of one class I had at college -- an early engineering or possibly math course.  The teaching assistant was, I believe, French.  As far as non-native-English-speaking TAs go, he was by no means the worst, and I wouldn't normally pick on someone's accent, but it did produce some amusing results. He would pronounced "integer" with a hard 'g', as "integrrrr" rather than the standard English (American?) pronunciation of "intejer".  It was jarring at first, but we quickly got used to it, to the point where American students answering questions would use his pronunciation and then correct themselves.

    I also had a DiffEq professor who consistently pronounced "matrix/matrices" like "mattress/mattresses".  But everyone knew what he meant, plus he was freaking brilliant, so no one ever complained.

     

    I spent a whole semester wondering what "Creamer Row" was before the Chinese prof finally wrote Cramer's Rule on the board.

     

     

  • Ben Hutchings (unregistered) in reply to AdT

    AdT:
    Anonymous:


    redminds me of my networking class where the professor stated that client machines ALWAYS use ports > 1024 and servers ALWAYS use ports < 1024.

     riiiiiight....


    What many people don't know is that web servers do not serve requests on port 80, they only listen on port 80. When a connection request is accepted, another dynamic port is opened that will handle the actual connection (this is normal TCP).

    The reason they don't know this is that it's not true. Each new connection results in a new socket (or similar entity) on the server but it's bound to the same port as the listening socket. A host distinguishes TCP connections by the 4-tuple (local address, local port, remote address, remote port) which is present in the headers of each packet.
  • Ben Hutchings (unregistered) in reply to AdT

    AdT:
    Anonymous:


    redminds me of my networking class where the professor stated that client machines ALWAYS use ports > 1024 and servers ALWAYS use ports < 1024.

     riiiiiight....


    What many people don't know is that web servers do not serve requests on port 80, they only listen on port 80. When a connection request is accepted, another dynamic port is opened that will handle the actual connection (this is normal TCP).

    The reason they don't know this is that it's not true. Each new connection results in a new socket (or similar entity) on the server but it's bound to the same port as the listening socket. A host distinguishes TCP connections by the 4-tuple (local address, local port, remote address, remote port) which is present in the headers of each packet.
  • jdsmith (unregistered) in reply to Andrew Shell

    This reminds me of several incidents at 2 different technical colleges I attended.

    For my Oracle class, the schools IT department had installed Oracle incorrectly on our computers. The first half of the class went fine. The second half, nothing worked. The teacher didn't know anything about Oracle, we just basically were given the books and told to do the chapter while he sat in his office and played solitaire. Another classmate and I spent weeks figuring out the problem and fixing all the computers in the classroom... And after turning in all of the homework, getting A's on the tests, I got a B- in the class due to "lack of participation"...

    Another school the head of the computer department asked me "what are you doing here? would you be interested in helping me rewrite the computer careers curriculum?", although to his credit, it was his first year there and he was totally appalled at the shape of their program.

     

  • baf (unregistered) in reply to Dazed
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

    This is NOT a WTF. The <html> element is implied in a html document

    Nope. According to the W3C spec, a page MUST have an HTML, HEAD, and BODY element. See: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html
    Oh dear. Here we go again. The element is required, but the tags are not. In other words the element is implicit, as already stated. See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.3. Try it in a validator.


    This is correct, according to my understanding.  However, it is still not the case that you can begin a valid HTML document with a <body> tag.  The reason:
    • Although the <head> tag is optional, there will be a head element whether you put it explicitly in or not.
    • The title element is a required part of the head element.
    • The <title> tag, unlike the <head> tag, is NOT optional.
     So a document starting with <body> has skipped the mandatory <title> tag.

  • Freaky (unregistered) in reply to Christopher Clark
    Christopher Clark:

    Personally, I use XHTML 1.1


    While we're talking standards then, from XHTML Media Types: "the use of 'text/html' SHOULD be limited to HTML-compatible XHTML 1.0 documents"

    That is, text/html in the context of XHTML is only for documents using the XHTML 1.0 HTML Compatibility Guidelines: XHTML 1.1 has changes which make it incompatible with HTML, and lacks any guidelines about avoiding such issues.  Assuming you're not transforming it or you're otherwise not serving it to the likes of IE, what's so wonderful about 1.1 which outweighs the SHOULD NOT on serving it to most clients?
  • (cs) in reply to JD

    More dumber is right!!

  • (cs) in reply to GT
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

     I've seen my share of dumb profs who said stupid things or couldn't teach worth beans.  My favourite was the network prof who gave us an example with the IP address 333.333.333.333. 

    Makes sense, they probably get worried about some random server getting crack attempts from inside the Uni, because they accidentally gave out a valid IP address which happened to be a real interface in area51a.mil.  Many textbooks will give clearly fatuous IP addresses (or failing that, RFC1918 ones) including ones which have 555 as the second octet, which Americans seem to find amusing.  In fact there's an episode of NCIS where the on-screen addresses have four-digit octets...but I'm not willing to bet against them being real servers expressed in octal ;-)

    Americans fing the '555' in the second octet amusing because it is common in US movies/tv that a phone number is always faked with '555' in the exchange, or second group of numbers after the area code. 

    Dave Chappelle did a bit about this in one of his stand-up comedy shows. They have to use fake phone numbers, because there is always some idiot who will try to call the number and try to talk to the character - "Hi, can I speak to Indiana Jones?"

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymoose DBA
    Anonymous:

    <sarcasm>

    The </sarcasm> tag is optional. But if you have the </sarcasm> tag you must have the beginning <sarcasm> tag as well. Check it in the validator here http://thedailywtf.com/forums/AddPost.aspx?PostID=107247&Quote=True

    Trust me, I programmed this post myself.

    </sarcasm>

    LOL! I've been scrolling past most of the approx. 2 million comments about what constitutes valid HTML, but I'm glad I stopped on this one.

  • PaTcHeS (unregistered) in reply to Don

    Granted, not at the collegiate level, but I had a teacher who was this bad in high school.  He was the Computer Science teacher / Wrestling coach, and he taught us that the primary difference between C and C++ was that in C++ you could use the "++" operator as an iterator.  Unfortunately, I am not making this up.  We also got through the whole year without touching objects or classes (which probably isn't surprising, given his lack of knowledge).

    I had an experience like this in High School.  I was in my Senior year, taking a Trig class.  The teacher we had had just given birth a few days before the school year, and was on convolecent leave.  The substitute teacher we had didn't know any trig, and spent the first class of the day sitting in on the Honors Trig class, then tring to teach all the other classes of the day....

     

     

    Very funny....

     

    Patches

  • woohoo (unregistered)

    OMG, this is quite extreme... but perhaps the more subtle WTFs are even worse, because most of the strudents will not notice them and just incorporate the WTF in their "knowledge"...

    I remember one prof doing a C++ course who did not grasp the concept of passing objects by value vs. by reference.
    e.g., one example was a class implementing complex numbers. In the "divide()" method he needed a helper instance of a complex number (division of complex numbers can be simply done by multiplying with the complex conjugate of the denominator) and therefore created one with "new" and also used this instance for storing the result. So far, so good. Then, after being done with it, he left the method by immediately passing this result back by value in the return statement and could obviously not call "delete" on the object's reference inside the method after returning from it. Unfortunately, passing the object by value does not pass the reference back to the caller, so the caller can't delete the object either. This is a quite popular form of a subtle memory leak, which is - not surprisingly - created by many students all the time (especially in the beginning), but seeing this "pattern" being presented by a prof as "best practice" did hurt a little.

    But the real WTF was still to come: When I pointed out the problem, he simply refused to believe me and - to proof his point - compiled and ran the program with one single division operation! Of course, this being a memory leak that only kills memory two floats' worth each time (8 byte on the system in question) it worked flawlessly (even despite the fact that this was an Intel 386 with 1024k of memory ;o)
    It took me 10 minutes to talk him into surrounding the calculation with a loop that repeated it for a significant number of times. I'll never forget his face when this time his ingenious creation crashed ingloriously with an "out of memory error"... ;oP

    Nevertheless he still failed to see the point.....

  • anonymoose (unregistered) in reply to Shaper
    Anonymous:

    HTML is not a programming language.

    Programming languages define operations.  There are no operations in HTML.

    Programming languages support flow-control, like if statements/JNEs and loops.  There is no flow-control in HTML.

    Programming languages support variables/registers.  There are no variables in HTML. 

    HTML is a markup language.  It is applied to a body of text, and is used to "mark up" the various elements either semantically (good, original intention) or for formatting purposes (bad, and not what HTML was ever originally intended for).

    HTML is a list of fancy formatting codes.  Unless you'd argue the RTF spec constitutes a programming language, you can't argue HTML is one, either.

    There is no definition of "programming language" that includes HTML and excludes, say, the specs for the Word DOC format (in fact, this includes active elements like macros, so there's more in favour of this being a programming language than HTML).

    There are, however, easy definitions which exclude HTML but include every other widely-agreed-on programming language in the world.



    Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Specific_Language (italics are mine):

    A domain-specific programming language (domain-specific language, DSL) is a programming language designed to be useful for a specific set of tasks. This is in contrast to general-purpose programming language (general-purpose language, GPL), such as C or Java...

    and also:

    A DSL is created specifically to solve problems in a particular domain and is not intended to be able to solve problems outside of it. In contrast, General-purpose programming languages are created to solve problems in many domains. General Purpose Languages are necessarily Turing Complete.

    HTML seems to fit the definition of a DSL.  Funny though, they say a DSL is a programming language, but the acronym doesn't include a "P". :)


  • Dave (unregistered)

    I've seen similar sad examples of "educators" delivering flawed information, though this story most certainly takes the case. I just wrapped up an exam today for a certification course in CSS with a rather well-established training organization, and I was extremely frustrated with the number of questions and multiple choice "answers" that were completely and utterly flawed to the point of being outright wrong. Things that went completely against the W3C spec, like one question that basically asserted that pixels are an absolute length unit of measure - they are explicitly defined as relative units by the W3C. Or like the earlier comments that assert you don't need the html element for a valid document. What's a standards geek to do?

  • Richard@Home (unregistered) in reply to Dave

    I couldn't be bothered to check through 260 odd comments, but:

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
    <title>foo</title>
    <p>foo</p>

    IS completely valid. Copy and paste the code into

    http://validator.w3.org/

     

  • (cs) in reply to ahh, the good old days strike again

    It looks to me that the situation cannot adequately be explained by stupidity. I suggest that:

    • she's related to someone really important at WTFU
    • she's f***ing someone really important at WTFU
    • she knows where the bodies are buried (or who buried them)

    Just be grateful that she's not setting the exams.

  • (cs)

    I should know better than to drink anything while reading this site...

  • Alan (unregistered) in reply to Wolven
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Most people using XHTML should be shot. Google "XHTML considered harmful" to find out why -- in essence, most people using "XHTML" actually send tag soup as they use the wrong MIME type (because MSIE 7.x and older can not parse application/xhtml+xml documents and thus try to download them instead -- this is intentional because the dev team decided not to support XHTML rather than having broken support for a language which has strict syntax rules).

    If you do it right (e.g. only use a subset of XHTML and HTML so you can convert from HTML to XHTML or vice versa depending on what the browser prefers/understands -- or use an XML base and convert that via XSLT server-side), there's nothing bad about XHTML (apart from being a buzzword used by clueless management a lot), though.

    CAPTCHA: hotdog. Yumm! 

    Unfortunately, your last point is utter bullshit. Some people consider XHTML harmful, but others, like me, use it because we use other tools like XSL and XML parsers which don't work correctly on HTML documents. Use whats right for you, not what some "expert" decided is correct, because he/she can't see the use for it. Besides, sending it as text/html to incompatible browsers isn't all that troublesome if you actually know what you're doing. 

     

    What last point? That it's a buzzword? It IS a buzzword. I didn't say that that makes it a bad language, though. It's just difficult to find someone who knows what it actually is and doesn't just paste it on their resume in home that future employers will not know any better.

    XHTML itself is usually not considered harmful. As I said, abusing XHTML is harmful. Verily so. Sending XHTML as text/html IS harmful. It's not XHTML if you do that, it's HTML tag soup that happens to look like XHTML, too. Sending XHTML as text/html to incompatible browsers is troublesome because you are sending tagsoup instead of standards compliant HTML -- as a result you'll have to cope with your (presumably otherwise standards compliant) code being treated as such.

    If you are sending non-compliant browsers tag soup, you might just as well disregard the XHTML specs for creating that tag soup. Changing the extension of a Word Document to RTF doesn't magically make it an RTF file -- regardless of whether your word processor manages to make something useful out of it when you try to open the file.

    Google for the reasons XHTML is "considered harmful" before throwing a fit and calling bullshit. It's not the language that makes it harmful, it's the people who misuse the language, which, if you send XHTML as text/html, includes you, too.

    Oh, and of course the W3C's XHTML 1.0 spec suggests a way to write XHTML 1.0 documents which pass as slightly tag-soupy HTML 4.01 (with all the slashes in self-closing elements and such XML-y goodness), but those techniques rely on an incomplete adherence to the HTML specs (if browsers would support all of SGML, they would render the slash in empty elements after the element -- this is a peculiar thing about SGML most people are not aware of and which browsers prefer not to implement; they're not supposed to be full-fledged SGML browsers anyway) and the W3C openly acknowledges that these techniques don't make XHTML documents real HTML documents.

    Also note that for an XHTML document to be written that way you need to stick to a subset of XHTML rather than using its full power (such as including other namespaces, e.g. MathML or SVG, in the same document). xml:lang is invalid in HTML 4.01, but lang is redundant in XHTML 1.0.

    CAPTCHA: photogenic -- the hell I am 

  • - (unregistered) in reply to CD

    Anonymous:
    Playschool U, for sure...  At my school, which was by now means Ivy League, a course we were taking (Operating Systems) required us to create a group web-page on post stuff on the page.  One student replied with "But, we haven't had a web development class... Nobody said we would have to develop web pages!"  To this the teacher replied, "Are you serious?  It's easy, open a web-page from a site and figure it out.  If that doesn't work out, here <hands student something>".  The teacher handed the student a drop slip for the class and proceeded to tell us if we wanted to learn how to write web pages, we were in the wrong major (computer science) and that web pages were just another tool, like Word or an editor. 

    Reminds me of a course I took at the University of Oslo a few years ago (1999). It was a System development course (Books: "Ian Sommerville: Software Engineering" and "Craig Larman: Applying UML and Patterns"). We had to learn most of the theory in those books and had to do a lot of practical work too.

    We were given a huge task that we had to work on as a project in groups of 6. It was an existing C++ project, so we got one week to learn enough C++ to do the job. There was a single lecture named "How to program C++ when you know Simula", and we had to figure the rest out on our own.

    In the project we also had to learn on our own how to make bash-scripts, makefiles, use CVS, write project reports in Latex and lots of other stuff. One of our tasks was to modify the program to output data in in HTML format, which we also had to learn on our own. It was assumed that we should be able to find some documentation on the web. There were no practical questions in the exams, just theoretical ones (waterfall method vs other methods etc.), so this was just to get a feel over how stuff works in the real life. Of course we divided the work between us, so that we didn't have to learn everything, but that was one of the points of this project. We were overwhelmed with work and had to learn how to work together and share the load :-)

    And that was just one of the two courses I took that semester...

     

  • - (unregistered) in reply to -
    Anonymous:

    Reminds me of a course I took at the University of Oslo a few years ago (1999). It was a System development course (Books: "Ian Sommerville: Software Engineering" and "Craig Larman: Applying UML and Patterns"). We had to learn most of the theory in those books and had to do a lot of practical work too.

     Sorry, the second book came later, but it was a similar type of book :-)

  • BEN (unregistered) in reply to Kiss me, I'm Polish

    My AI class instructor once asked us how to mount her local hard drive when she logged into the UNIX server. No sexism here. She even has PHD degree in CS.

  • (cs) in reply to BEN
    Anonymous:
    My AI class instructor once asked us how to mount her local hard drive when she logged into the UNIX server. No sexism here. She even has PHD degree in CS.
    Maybe she was a Plan 9 user. ;-)
  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Ben Hutchings
    Anonymous:
    The reason they don*t know this is that it's not true. Each new connection results in a new socket (or similar entity) on the server but it's bound to the same port as the listening socket. A host distinguishes TCP connections by the 4-tuple (local address, local port, remote address, remote port) which is present in the headers of each packet.

    You're right. Sorry... :-(

    Captcha: clueless

  • huxley (unregistered) in reply to Dazed

    Which would be relevant if the W3 spec was written for web developers. Even though it is used by them, the specs are actually written for programmers developing user-agents (eg browsers) that support the spec. User-agents have to accept HTML that may not have the tags (hence they are optional) and act as though the elements were implied, however that isn't how HTML is supposed to be written (though a user-agent that supports the spec will still render improper HTML).


    Web developers must use HTML, HEAD and BODY elements, but user-agents supporting HTML4.01 can't assume that they will.

  • (cs) in reply to huxley
    Anonymous:
    Which would be relevant if the W3 spec was written for web developers. Even though it is used by them, the specs are actually written for programmers developing user-agents (eg browsers) that support the spec. User-agents have to accept HTML that may not have the tags (hence they are optional) and act as though the elements were implied, however that isn't how HTML is supposed to be written (though a user-agent that supports the spec will still render improper HTML).

    Web developers must use HTML, HEAD and BODY elements, but user-agents supporting HTML4.01 can't assume that they will.

    No, in W3 speak "Web developers should use HTML, HEAD and BODY elements..."

    In any case it ought to read "Web developers should use <html>, <head> and <body> tags" as all the elements are implied. Using the tags just makes it more structured, which could be considered as easier to maintain. 

  • (cs)

    Sadly I've met such a bad teacher myself once.

    It was on a course where my colleagues and I were preparing to become Java Certified Progammer a number of years ago.

    The teacher was a girl who had done some COBOL programming before. She had never used Java in a real-world project. She didn't even know that Java is case-sensitive, so she wondered why her program didn't compile when she wrote "True" instead if "true".

    The course was a waste of time and money...
     

  • James Gregory (unregistered)

    This sounds very familiar. Once upon a time I attended a BTEC in I.T. (UK) and when being interviewed for the course I mentioned that I'd done some website development, at which the course head remarked "Looks like I'll be picking your brains, as I'm to be teaching Web Development this year.".

    Lets just say I didn't stay past 1 month.
     

  • Ketchup (unregistered) in reply to JD
    Anonymous:

    Totally believable!  At my last university, this was the "norm".  We got so tired of complaining about instructors, that we kinda gave up and just went with the flow in order to complete our degrees.  One teacher actually got through 5 weeks before he realized that he was teaching the wrong material (not even remotely related to the actual course).  Nobody said anything to him once about it since we were just relaxing and getting an "A" for showing up.  Unfortunately many people dropped out of school and went on to "real life" without their degree because of this university.  And those of us who graduated, ended up being more dumberer for having gone to class.

    I take it you graduated.
     

  • Shaper (unregistered) in reply to JL
    Anonymous:
    I disagree: defining "programming languages" is inherently difficult.

    Agreed.  No argument here.  A formal definition is pretty hard to come by, but I think a list of essential attributes is reasonable and fairly easy.

    For instance, look at your requirement that a programming language defines new operations.  Assembly language does no such thing.  You have a fixed set of operations -- the opcodes -- and a bunch of constants.  Sure, modern assembly languages have things like macros and subroutines, but the early ones did not.  Is assembly language a programming language?

    Miscommunication/misunderstanding: I meant the language must define operations, not that the user must be able to define new operators.

    Maybe I should have put "support", as I did for the other two examples. "Programming Languages must support the concept of operators (whether user-defined or system-defined)" - better?  You don't have to be able to define your own operators, but a programming language without operators is basically a programming language without operations, I don't see how you can have "programming" without "operations".

    How about your requirement that a programming language needs variables or registers?  The reverse-polish-notation programs for HP calculators has no variables -- everything is stored on the stack.  Likewise, there are stack-based assembly programs and virtual machines that have no variables, and you can program in subsets of Forth or Postscript without using registers or variables and still have a Turing-complete program.  For that matter, a Turing machine has no variables -- just the memory strip.  Is a Turing machine program a programming language?

    Again, I'm talking in general terms - is or is not "the stack" a place where you can put arbitrary values, and reacquire those values from later?  Then it's a "variable" of some type or another.  Maybe I should have used the precise terminology, but apart from "variable" what other word is there in the English language for "somewhere you can put something with an arbitrary value and re-read it back in later"?

    What about flow control? Even a Turing machine has flow control, right?  Well, Turing machines have been proven equivalent to the Church lambda calculus, which to my understanding has no flow control -- it's just math.

    "Proven equivalent to" != "Is identical to".  I'm also suspicious about the "to my understanding" part.  Maybe you can express many of the same concepts in "math" and "programming", but I doubt you're trying to suggest they're exactly the same thing.

    Math itself can be done without flow control... Is it a programming language?  How about a subset of the Mathematica programming language?  Turing-complete, but no flow control.  Or if this is all a stretch, how about Prolog -- a "widely agreed upon" declarative, Turing-complete programming language with no flow control.

    I wouldn't call math a programming language, either.  It has variables (in algebra) and operators, but no flow control. 

    Again, I never mentioned Turing-completeness once.  I would expect that Turing-completeness was essential for any really useful general-purpose programming language, but not necessarily essential for "a programming language" of any type.

     

    Prolog is a difficult case, and I'll freely admit I'm not familiar with it.  Nevertheless, Wikipedia handily offers the factoid: "Unlike other programming languages, Prolog does not provide loop constructions. Iterations, however, can be achieved through the use of recursion. Two kinds of recursion exist: tail recursion and non-tail recursion".

    So while it may not offer flow-control "loops" as a language construct, it clearly offers the functionality of "looping", irrespective of how it's expressed.  Again, perhaps my terminology could have been more precise, but the functionality is there.

     

    And even Turing-completeness is not a sure thing -- it includes things that aren't "widely agreed upon" programming languages and excludes others.  The term "programming languages" is not an easy thing to define.

    I stick to my previous definition:

    Variables ("a method of storing arbitrary values and using them again later") - including stacks, registers, references, pointers or variables)

    Flow Control ("a method or methods of changing the sequence of instructions executed") - includes loops, if-then-elses, recursion and functions.

    Operations ("a way of changing one thing into another") - includes arithmetic, joins, splits, comparisons, etc.

     

    Anonymoose:
    A DSL is created specifically to solve problems in a particular domain and is not intended to be able to solve problems outside of it. In contrast, General-purpose programming languages are created to solve problems in many domains. General Purpose Languages are necessarily Turing Complete.

    HTML seems to fit the definition of a DSL.  Funny though, they say a DSL is a programming language, but the acronym doesn't include a "P". :)

    I never mentioned Turing-completeness as a requirement.  And your quote only says what general-purpose programming languages necessarily do... it says nothing about whether DSLs must also conform to these restrictions.

    Nevertheless, to qualify as a programming language I believe one must implement (at least) some form of variable-value-storage, some form of flow control, and operations of some sort.

    Otherwise why isn't English a domain-specific programming language?  Or chess notation?

  • airdrummer (unregistered) in reply to SeeJay

    what, u never heard of affirmative action? it's illegal 2 discriminate on the basis of...wtf???

  • wds (unregistered)

    Alex Papadimoulis:
    Gabrielle's grasp of "documents" versus "programs" was just as painfully embarrassing. After editing an HTML document, she'd always say, "OK, I'm now saving my HTML program and will run it in Internet Explorer." I won't even get into how much Gabrielle struggled with doing actual web development in PHP.

    Actually, the difference between the two isn't quite clear. Since HTML mixes document information and layout you could state that it is a scripting language and thus Internet Explorer is an interpreter for it. It might come across as non-sensical since HTML is a 'programming language' that mixes a lot of data with its "commands" and is probably not turing complete but she was technically correct. Contrast it for instance with ps, another document description language, but one that allows for pretty ingenious programming.

  • skztr (unregistered) in reply to Shaper

    I would say that in order to be a programming language, it needs to be capable of producing different results from different input. But even that seems too exclusive, as it requires things be able to accept input. A lot of stupid day-one CS assignments don't take any input, but I wouldnt say there's any threshold to cross whereby "okay, now yer doin' you some programmin".

     Though I wouldnt call it an absolute qualifier, any decent programming language is going to have some type of conditional statement. However:

    GO UP
    GO LEFT
    GO RIGHT
    GO DOWN

     it seems that might constitute a "programming language", though an extremely limited one.

    A programming language tells a system what actions to take, while a markup language helps to describe data which another system was going to take action with regardless.

    The line may be blurry at times, but HTML is far from the blur.

  • (cs)

    Not having read all the comments, I'm sure both have been mentioned, but I can think of two possible reasons for this:

     1) If tought by a CS department at a decent university, a class this simple was not only for non-majors, it was probably for 'non-sentients'. As such, the departmental budget was probably $0, and they just randomly picked a registered student and offered the credits for free if that student tought instead of studenting.

    2) It could have been tought by one of those brilliant grad students that are only interested in the theory of computation, or some other esoteric level of CS.  Really, nothing in the article is CS. At my University, half of the CS professors couldn't have installed windows or turned off spellcheck in Word, for the same reason I can't sew my own clothes - other people can do it, why waste my time on it?
     
    I am a bit confused why someone that reads the thedailywtf would be spending money and time on a course this basic. It's like someone on chemicalwtf.com posting an idiocy from their C034 chemical science for scholarship athletes course.

     

  • Beanolini (unregistered) in reply to Neomojo
    Anonymous:

    Yes, it validates as a fragment, but it does not validate if you save it as a file and upload it to the validator 

    The uploaded document &quot;foo.htm&quot;


was checked and found to be <em>tentatively</em> valid HTML 4.01 Strict.
This means that with the use of some fallback or override mechanism, 
we successfully performed a formal validation using an SGML or XML 
Parser. In other words, the document would validate as 
HTML 4.01 Strict if you changed the markup
to match the changes we have performed automatically, but 
<strong>it will not be valid until you make these changes</strong>.

    If you use CSS in your document, you should also 

    check it for validity

using the W3C
<a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/">CSS Validation Service</a>.

     

     It does validate if you add a content-type meta tag:

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    <title>foo</title>
    <p>foo</p>

     

  • (cs) in reply to Caffeine
    Caffeine:
    Anonymous:

    What a thread going nowhere.

    Reminds me of 13 year old kids.

    www.adgerlinux.com    www.vintagecomputermanuals.com

     We'll consider ourselves suitably chastised by the FrontPage 5.0 master.

    Hahahahah owned

  • KHadden (unregistered)

    Must have been University Of Phoenix.

  • Nicolas (unregistered) in reply to Craig B
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

    My favourite was the network prof who gave us an example with the IP address 333.333.333.333. 

    Your prof might have been smarter than you think. I've worked on a couple of very old operating systems where that *is* a valid IP address. What the comptuer would do is keep subtracting 256 from each quad until it got a result in [0,255]. I believe this used to be used in obfuscating links in web pages.

     

    B 

    Probably not substracting 256, but overflowing the 8-bit variable where it's stored. Same effect, different cause.
  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    I got out of CS the first time because of a teaching language called "Scheme" which was the default language for the first 6 or so required classes. I transferred to a different school later, but never went back to CS, until years later.

    I don't know about that. I'd be actually happy to use a language that lets you write several complete nontrivial programs during one test. Try that with C, C++ or Pascal. Let me know when you finish writing the #includes ;)

    A quote from http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html, which I can't agree more with:

    The root of this problem lies in what is currently thought to be important for students to learn in programming courses, namely, syntax. Whoever is designing the high school computer science curriculum seems to think that, once students learn the rules of the language they are studying, having them write programs that demonstrate how those rules are applied will teach them what is important in computer science.

    You may argue that someone who can't grasp something 'as trivial' as C or Pascal's syntax is not fit to learn any CS. To this I only say: reality check -- it just isn't so.

  • nitz (unregistered)

    So, ITT Tech then?

  • Sam (unregistered)

    The irony of this article is that, with the advent of HTML5, it is indeed now legal to omit the HTML tag.

  • SomeName (unregistered)

    How the hell did she get a job? Terrible recruiters? Diversity quota? Bribes? Relatives? Sexual favors?

  • ppu-prof_Hag (unregistered)

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  • Teplo_Dom_Hag (unregistered)

    Переутомились промерзать зимой и излишне выплачивать за отопление? Утепление фасада – решение проблемы! Компания "Тепло и уют" с 2010 года предлагает профессиональные услуги по утеплению фасадов зданий любой сложности. За это время мы зарекомендовали себя как надежный и обязательный партнер, о чем свидетельствуют разнообразные отзывы наш&

  • Teplo_Dom_Hag (unregistered)

    Переутомились замерзать зимой и переплатить за отопление? Обтепление фасада – решение проблемы! Компания "Тепло и уют" с 2010 года предлагает квалифицированные услуги по теплообеспечению фасадов зданий любой сложности. За это время мы зарекомендовали себя как прочный и обязательный партнер, о чем свидетельствуют многие отзывы наших клиен&

  • ppu-pro_Si (unregistered)

    Наша бригада опытных исполнителей приготовлена предоставлять вам инновационные системы, которые не только обеспечивают надежную охрану от холода, но и подарят вашему дому изысканный вид. Мы занимаемся с современными компонентами, утверждая долгий срок эксплуатации и превосходные итоги. Теплоизоляция наружных стен – это не только эк&#1

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