Comment by michaelsbradley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelsbradley | Hacker News Reader

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michaelsbradley

I was in honors freshman chemistry at university. Tough class, all homework (lots of it) graded rigorously, but only the midterm and final counted toward the course grade. So if you wanted an A you had to get an A on both exams.

After midterm, during every other lecture at least, the professor would sound a refrain: “An orbital is not a house! An electron does not live in a house!”

Final exam had a small number of complex problems to work out with pen and paper, tough stuff, lots of calculus. But the last question ended with “where does the electron live?”

That final problem, if you ignored the end wording, was super easy, something almost trivial to do with Helium iirc. The class had about 25 students in it; about 5 of us independently had the same thought: “this is a trick question, ‘the orbital is not a house in which the electron lives!’” And, independently, that’s how we five answered.

And we got marked wrong, all our course grades dropped to B+/- because of that one damn question.

Over a lunch or whatever, we discovered our shared experience and approached the professor as a group. He listened patiently and said: “Ah, right, I did insist on that idea, it’s understandable why you would think it’s a trick question and answer that way. But I still consider your answers wrong, grades stay as they are.” Some in the group even went to the dean and, to my understanding, he said it’s best to consider it a life lesson and move on.

Having gone both to a liberal arts institution and a large public university, it is not clear to me what the professors in the latter were actually doing vis a vis their teaching responsibilities that actually provided value.

Lectures that came straight from the book I could have read, recitations and problem reviews done by grad students, and tests that were little more than variations on homework problems of varying difficulty.

Maybe they were getting paid for research, but I dunno. At the liberal arts college, I actually received an education instead of bootstrapping it myself from a syllabus.

I agree this seems overly principled to me.

I recall a DSP class where there was an exam with a question like (not exactly this):

> What does the following code print?

> `printf("Hello, world!");`

If you responded with:

> Hello, world!

...which - of course - the whole class did, you got the question wrong.

If you responded with:

> "Hello, world!"

...which is actually not what that would print, you got the question right.

A small band of us went to the professor and noted that, in fact, `printf("Hello, world!")` does not print the quotes. But he wanted us to show that it printed a string, and we denote strings by quotes.

This was something that we learned to do just for him - all strings had to be enclosed by quotes, to denote that they were strings. As far as I'm concerned, it served no practical purpose; we never had to differentiate strings like "Hello" from ['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', 0] or other representations.

A better example of how this could go - and not one that had anywhere near the same stakes - was a question on the entrance exam for my college radio station:

> What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

I got this question right by answering, "Ni!"

(edit: formatting)

Depending on your environment, the above printf might print nothing at all, because there is no trailing newline.

The kind of prof who never coded a useful program in his life.

I have my own, similar stories but, as a mediocre student, they were lost in the noise of my own mistakes. Nonetheless it's injustice, so I still remember it. Some people on this site were really excellent students, where these deductions really mattered. I don't know how they cope.

Yeah that sucks, the hard life lesson where you have to swallow your pride and go "fine, I will put quotes on the infernal thing"

But... it does not print a string, a string goes into it but what comes out of the function is not that programmatic feature we call a string in any way shape or form, what comes out depends on the output device specified, it may be ink on paper, lit phosphors, or a stream of bytes. none of which can you use in your program as a string.

sprintf being a notable exception of course. there you do get a string out of it.

Update: language is weird and the more I read my statement the weirder it gets, all I can do is add this cryptic note. "When you print a string it does not produce a string", this usually means I am wrong about something.

"string" is a type that only makes sense inside the context of a specific programming language, because programming languages differ on what a string is and how it behaves (is it guaranteed to be valid UTF8, does it carry its own length around with it, is it runes/graphemes and can't be split on byte boundaries easily, is it mutable, etc).

Double quotes are a syntax sugar for string literals in source code, in a particular language, to avoid writing `string.from_byte_array([97, 98, 99])` or `new String({97, 98, 99});` or whatever. Strings are single quoted not double quoted in Dyalog APL, there's several different strings in SWI Prolog depending on using double quotes or backticks and how the flags are set.

stdout is an untyped byte stream which could go to a printer or Braille terminal or anything as you say, but could be terminal control codes, image data, or whatever. The OS doesn't tend to have a 'string type' ... but in PowerShell `write-output "a"` will write a .NET System.String to the output stream, but it won't use "printf()".

Yeah? What "life lesson" does the dean think you're going to learn from that? That authority figures cannot be trusted because they will hurt you with bureaucratic stupidity. Does the dean, as an authority figure, really want that to be the lesson you learn?

That sometimes you can do everything right and still lose.

A kid might see it in terms of "authority figures," but live long enough and you'll understand it's everyone. Not just your professors and bosses, but your subordinates, your friends, your lovers, even your children will judge you unjustly from time to time. But that doesn't mean the world is poison and existence is a curse. It just means you have to learn to get by despite other people's imperfections the same way they get by despite yours.

Except that you can't get by if the other person is an authority figure and the imperfection is throwing you under the bus.

Your statement makes no sense in the context you're answering to.

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