Developer priorities throughout their career

I’m probably still in the valley of 1337: my apologies to anyone who has to read my macros.

What’s “DRY”?

In the graph above, I mean.

“Don’t Repeat Yourself”

Reminds me of this: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~robin/class/449/Evolution.htm

Read it as a mantra: “Don’t Repeat Yourself” “Don’t Repeat Yourself” “Don’t Repeat Yourself” “Don’t Repeat Yourself” “Don’t Repeat Yourself”

Lol. Thanks! I will never forget it.

That evolution page above must be specifying the wrong character encoding. Quote characters are not displaying right on Chrome, which used to let me change the encoding of a page, but they removed the action from the menu at least.

Because to get at the bottom of the list, you need to be pretty old, and age+utf–8 = <?> :stuck_out_tongue:

Lol. I can only approximate the joke here. The author must be old because s/he has a life of Haskell investment. When s/he started the page, UTF–8 perhaps wasn’t even conceived yet, much less being a popular encoding that it is today.

I think there’s a discussion with Andy Hunt (of Pragmatic Programmer fame) about DRY. He said something to the effect that going all-in on the DRY principle might require some metaprogramming. When I read that with my Racket glasses on, I was taking him to advocate for macros.

Tha Haskell factorial link above made me think of this https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/how-not-to-teach-recursion/#%28part._.Factorial%29\|https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/how-not-to-teach-recursion/#%28part._.Factorial%29

Any academic folks here have opinions about Piazza’s change to a paid model? Anyone teach in a department or school that has negotiated a price with Piazza? I’m generally a strong supporter of paying for services I use; the prices I’m seeing from Piazza seem really high, though.

I’ve been happy about switching to campuswire

I don’t know what’s happening at my university currently (though I don’t imagine they’ll be wanting to fork out a whole lot to keep using Piazza), but I have seen other academics in CS mention Zulip as seemingly quite a good alternative.

Someone tried it out with a class of theirs, and apparently it was well-liked.

I’ve used (and liked) zulip, but i didn’t know it was quite the same kind of thing

the way i use it is basicly just Open source slack

I haven’t used Zulip, so I’m really not sure, but I think it has some notion of permanent threading or something, which apparently means that it can work similarly to Piazza.

Quote from someone who tried Zulip: > I’ve loved Zulip. It’s like Slack but substantially less rubbish. Not perfect, and it takes some time to get used to the notion of streams and topics, but I find that Zulip neatly supplants Slack and Piazza for a course. > > When asked to vote on what I would use in another course, students voted 17 to 2 in in favor of Zulip (with ~50% turnout in the class).

cool that people like it. It’s used a bit in the rust governance because it allows permanent storage (which was very important when selecting a new message system)

Also, back in the day before Piazza was a thing, the CS School at my uni used to run a webforum with a section for each course, which worked reasonably well to do the same sort of thing as Piazza. Maybe even something like a Discourse instance could do the trick. (Note that the School ended up disabling the ability for students to edit or delete their posts, since they found some students would post late at night something that violated academic honesty and then remove it a few hours later)

@samth Oh dear Heaven… another platform. Sigh. They certainly have won the SEO war; campuswire vs piazza searches all land on pages written by campuswire. It does look good, but I’m not sure I’ve seen both sides of the comparison.

There is this, though: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cornell/comments/euvccr/i_cant_be_the_only_one_who_thinks_campuswire_is/

Definitely something to take into account, but it looks like that was posted around February last year, and I get the impression that CampusWire has probably evolved quite a lot since then. (I have no experience with CW, so I can’t comment further)

I can imagine that it’s different if you have multiple classes in campuswire, but those posts do not ring true with my experience

On the topic of teaching undergrads Computer Science: