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Comment by azakai | Hacker News Reader

One of my professors actually made the opposite point: that in CS, the compiler will give you an error. You can fix it and move on to the next. While in math (he was a math prof), the paper doesn't object to your writing nonsense. If you have an error early on in your work, all the rest might be nonsense, and you only find out much later after a human grades it.

tl;dr at least in CS you get immediate negative feedback

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Around here most CS, math, and physics courses have "demonstrations" - weekly occasions where students present their solutions to homework exercises in a classroom setting. The answers are not graded, you just have to attend and be prepared to present if you're (semi-)randomly chosen by the instructor (a TA or sometimes the lecturer themselves).

It's fun to observe the teacher's reactions sometimes when it is apparent that the student presenting is clearly heading towards a train wreck of some sort due to misunderstanding the question, not being rigorous enough, or just being generally confused about the subject matter. Occasionally I've seen professors at the math dept get this visibly pained look in their face as they watch a CS student abuse their beloved math in particularly horrendous ways.

Until you're working on something that can segfault/fail to null terminate a string/fail to sanitize user input, etc. And the compiler won't tell you if the semantics of your program is garbage either.

Indeed very often the problems people encounter are described well in the error message and/or stacktrace that is printed. But many, many people find it very hard to correctly read and understand those and it's because that is also a hard skill to learn.

People will actively refuse to read error messages[1].

I don't know how many times I've been trying to fix something with somebody, and an error dialog comes up, and they dismiss it instantly, before whatever content it might hold has a chance to flash across their retinas. Then I have to get them to do whatever it was four or five more times, before they calm the hell down and let me read what the error message is telling them.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...

I agree. In no other area is the feedback loop so fast and can "experiments" be repeated so conveniently.

Incidentally, this is also why we see so many "experiments" in production code, which is the downside.

The real fun is when the compiler has no issues but things just are not working right. It's this type of situation "Stupid Computer Shit we all know" in these situations can ruffle-up classroom CS students. SCSWAK uses his skills to solve and try and add a bit or byte to the pile of shit.

Taking Calculus I in college most of the class had taken the course in high school. The most advanced math course in my HS had been Algebra II/advanced geometry. So they were ahead but it wasn't insurmountable, it was still math.

A classroom CS student trying to get an application to work asks a SCSWAK repository for assistance. One notepad app is suddenly 2 terminal windows with EMACKS? (at least it wasn't vim) on one and the other lots of lists go bye and quick commands are being entered while asking where the file is saved. "Nevermind, found it." The file contents show up but no editor was opened. Then there's all kinds of key combinations that no sense on the EMAKS just to move around! (add in more to the story).

One is still getting used to the operating system while the other has logged thousands of hours plugging away at the CLI. (Remember MUDS?) How the heck are the next 2.5-4 years going to be if the classroom CS couldn't follow anything he just saw?

Being around a bunch of SCSWAK who seem to naturally grasp everything can scare off students. IMHO the instructors for the low level CS courses should talk about this and get the classroom CS students to realize they can do just fine in the courses and SCSWAK are great resources if you can't find your answer on google. Also, the best way to actually learn something is to teach it. Thus, there's an opportunity for the SCSWAK group.

i sometimes wonder if a single line of code I wrote was ever run/checked by a TA or professor

I know for a fact mine weren't, because the profs tended to tell us so. Also, many of the academics could barely code themselves. Instead they found creative ways to set mark schemes such that the code didn't matter, even for programming assignments.

Getting the syntax right is the most trivial part of writing a useful program.

Running a program also gives feedback quicker than waiting for a professor to evaluate it.

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