Ask HN: Did early hobby programming take the excitement out of your CS degree? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did early hobby programming take the excitement out of your CS degree?

3 pointsamichail6 comments

Would you have enjoyed your CS degree more if you knew less about programming and CS before you started university?

Definitely not. Though I never completed it, I still ended up in as a software engineer in the end. Hobby programming definitely made me a much better programmer during my time in college. However Work definitely took the fun out of hobby programming.

It sure did to me. I started by learning basic, forth, pascal and 6502 assembler in the early 80s. Did tons of games, word processor and compiler projects. Then went to CS program had to deal with fortran and Cobol on projects that were not challenging. The intership i did ay[t a company supporting cobol maintenance sealed it there was zero way i could be a developer. Did many jobs from auditing, network engineer, product manager, etc until as gained seniority ended up managing development teams. Then i truly loved it once had the ability to shape direction of project. But funnythat never worked for the role fot. Degree on. However, getting tnat degree was key on my professional career

My CS degree started off with more obscure functional languages specifically to level the playing field between those with and without previous programming experience. I don't think programming experience would have made much difference - especially as most of CS isn't about programming.

No it helped it.

The first intro classes were boring because I already knew the entire curriculum. (Except for the specific programming language that was obscure but easy to learn)

In one obligatory assignment I solved the problem fairly quickly. Then the professor gave me an F on it because I had not solved it they way it was meant to be solved. Which was using the code we had learned so far in her class.

Mine was shorter and faster.

I was not at all pleased.

I ran into her a few days later and she apologized and said I have done a good done solving it and gave me an A. What a flip.

Once I got into more advanced classes I learned a lot at the uni.

I think it was the CS classes that took the fun out of the hobby programming.

Not really. It only gave really gave an advantage in 2-3 courses. The rest was basically applied math.

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