Comment by pfalcon
6 years ago
> Most uni courses seem to involve writing a "toy" solution from scratch, which is seldom the case in professional programming.
Without writing a "toy" from scratch, one would never understand professional programming or codebases either. They wouldn't understand why they oftentimes poorly designed, full of bugs, etc. Tracing own "from scratch" steps, with self-reflection, is the best way to be prepared to "professional" programming. First, make and find mistakes yourself, only then you will be ready to find mistakes in, and improve on, other people's stuff.
>>Without writing a "toy" from scratch, one would never understand professional programming or codebases either. They wouldn't understand why they oftentimes poorly designed, full of bugs, etc. Tracing own "from scratch" steps, with self-reflection, is the best way to be prepared to "professional" programming.
I disagree. All the toy from scratch provides is a way to get the student to go from zero to poorly designed solution during the course, which he can just forget it ever existed as soon as the grade is in.
Meanwhile, you have no experience onboarding to an unfamiliar codebase, have to find a bug and fix it, implement a feature, or refactor it to reduce technical debt and improve it according to some criteria. And that's pretty much at least 3/4ths of a developer's work.