11/24/04

A student writes:

     Professor Patt,

     First off, i just want to say, I am NOT asking the following to be
     difficult, on the contrary, i am trying to make things easier for
     myself(and possibly other students).
            
     Okay, so turns out I just read through the 5th program, and thought it
     would be easy, and I am correct. However, the subroutines and methods
     that the TA's have provided us as "starter code" make the program (to
     me) more difficult than it should be. I have found, in my own
     experience, that when you use object modules (or in this case,
     subroutines) that you did not write, the program does not work as well.
     So, my question is this, the program says we must use the starter code.
     Thats all fine and dandy, but would it be allowed for me to just jump
     over the entire starter code, and use my own? The reason I ask, is
     again, I want to save myself time and headaches and simply write the
     entire program myself, from scratch.
          
     Thanks, and have a nice thanksgiving,
     << name withheld to protect the subverter of the learning experience >>

At first blush, sounds reasonable, right?

Actually, wrong. For two reasons: the general reason and the specific reason.

The general reason:

It is important to get used to using object modules written by other people because that is the way the world works. You are going to find downstream that you will be forced to write code that adds to existing modules because either (a) they are there, robust, debugged, and your boss insists, or (b) the problem is so big that you can't possibly do it from scratch by yourself. Yes, I realize that if I choose (a), I am being a mean old Professor, and clearly (b) does not apply. However, school is about preparation for after commencement, and that means being able to function as part of a team, learning how to read, understand, use, etc someone else's code. So that is reason enough.

The specific reason:

There are several specific things we want to be sure you learn from this assignment, and if we let you run free, it is not clear you will learn them. Specifically, we want you to expose you to a common implementation of an array, which is an example of a useful data structure. By organizing the game board as we did, we are trying to get across a conventional approach to storing a two-dimensional array in memory and how you would go about accessing different parts of it with appropriate offsets.

So, while we may be making this assignment a little tougher for some of you than might be the case if we let you run free, there really is a method behind our madness.

Good luck. And, you also have a great Thanksgiving Day holiday.

Yale Patt