QUESTION: Hey, I am a second year math student who hasn't taken CS 115 yet. I have
to take it though, and while I was looking over the material I see that
the language and the logic is fairly simple. I learnt most of the logic
in VBA at work. I think I can pick up the rest later.
But what I
think I will have trouble with are the long useless definitions in the
course. For example I can do any of the coding questions without any
training, but memorizing shit like design recipe seems like a pain. Are
CS courses in Loo theoretical or does it suffice to know how to code?
Thanks.
TL;DR
is CS 115 theoretical or do the exams have mostly coding questions as
opposed to memorizing a bunch of crap like definitions
when i took it a few years ago the exams were pretty much all coding questions
ReplyDeleteThe design recipe is so simple. It's basically free marks and there is hardly anything to it. Regardless, the exam questions were mostly all coding. Some required particular steps of the design recipe. And just a few questions about time complexity.
ReplyDeleteI don't recall the course having many definitions at all...
As a former TA for this class, I can confirm that it is a joke. The amount of people who fucked up the design recipe (as mentioned in 2) was astounding and most marks were lost there. Unless things have changed, the language is Scheme, a functional programming language. Quite fun though!
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty much all coding, but you'll have to learn the design recipe or you'll lose about a quarter of the marks. Also, don't be too cocky walking in. They use scheme because it's a language you will be unfamiliar with.
ReplyDeleteAs dumb as it feels to do for dinky little CS115 problems, learning the design recipe is IMMENSELY useful to me now as a full-time developer. Well-documented is so so so much easier to read, debug, change, and build on. Get into good habits now and make future projects so much easier for yourself and your co-workers
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
Deletethis.
DeleteCame into the topic to say this.
DeleteIt feels dumb but just do it. You will thank your cs prof 5 years down the road when you learned good documenting habits
First year arts and took this class in Fall for a breadth requirement. Finished with a 92, no previous experience in CS and I'm awful at math, so you'll probably do fine.
ReplyDeleteA lot of marks are for the design recipe, and sometimes it's ridiculous. I wrote some programs that needed upwards of 50 tests because you need to check EVERY possible type of input, and it sucks when your commenting and testing make up more than 80% of the assignment. But sometimes it does help you find little glitches in your program, and when everything works perfectly it's pretty much mindless typing, you can do it while watching a movie in the background or something.
On tests it's mostly problem solving. Sometimes they will ask you to write "at least three tests" for a particular program or something of that nature. For me the biggest problem on midterms was that they're really picky about how you trace code.
you should switch to cs or do a cs minor, we need you
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