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CS253 Assignments Build

Academia

🎓

• In school, we only rarely reuse code.
• Sure, some classes, such as CS 314, do.
• Usually, you write a program, we test it and then it’s discarded.
• Students quickly learn that documentation is useless.
• Students quickly learn that writing readable, modular code has no value.

Industry

• In the “real world”, you rarely write code from scratch.
• Instead, most of your time (that concerns code at all) is spent debugging and adding features in old code.
• Therefore, a lot of time is spent trying to understand old code.
• As opposed to school, where very little time is spent doing that.

CS253

🏝️

• In this class, we try to do some code reuse.
• Some assignments will build on some other assignments.
• I won’t tell you what the future assignments are.
• I won’t tell you what aspects of the current assignment will be reused.
• I hope that this will teach you the value of writing readable and modular code.

Disaster

💥

• Alas, some students will skip, say, HW1.
• Unfortunately, another assignment, perhaps HW3, will build on HW1.
• Then the student can’t do HW3.
• Oh, look—HW5 depends on HW3! Oh, no!
• The student either hacks together a poor version of HW3 in order to write HW5, or just starts HW5 from scratch, which takes a lot of time.
• This is not the path to academic success.