Hacker News Reader

Comment by tester34 | Hacker News Reader

I think it is very reasonable idea, but time's gonna show how it'll affect maintainers when majority of schools start doing it

>The most common problems faced by the students over their assignment are the inability to build the project

sounds like somebody tried to build llvm

View on HN

The ability to build any project is a strange thing you learn after a few years as a software engineer. As a jnr. dev I was completely awed at my co-workers ability to understand build/compiler errors. Well you basically get that for free banging your head against a wall long enough, and being paid for it!

Many open source projects are hard to build, especially C/C++ ones because these languages don't have a standarized package manager and a proper package ecosystem. C/C++ projects often use Makefiles which rely on bash commands. If you're on Windows, good luck. Sometimes you get lucky and there's a CMake file which can create a Visual Studio solution for you.

With languages like Rust, D or any webdev project it's much easier, because you can go "cargo build" and it will autodownload dependencies and build everything, no matter the OS.

I think if the course instructors are more or less experienced contributors and put a focus on meta-aspects such as respectful communication (valuing maintainer time), this could work. Of course, this also means that at the moment, many schools do not have teachers with relevant expertise, I suppose...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com