Java/Coding people, please help?

[niteflyx]

Originally Posted by Dinthug

while(guessAnswer < rightAnswer){

change that to while(guessAnswer != right Answer)

that's the only thing you messed up on, then you just need to print that the answer is correct below the while loop (since the answer will equal the guess and end the loop)

Well, within that loop put the two if statements that would output the appropriate response ("Too high!" "Too low!")

[Tenks]

I hate to be too negative but honestly Kuriin can't be learning anything by having all of FOH answer these very basic, simple problems for him.

If programming is a career you are going for I would reconsider. If it is just a mandatory class you have to take, well good luck.

[niteflyx]

Originally Posted by Tenks

I hate to be too negative but honestly Kuriin can't be learning anything by having all of FOH answer these very basic, simple problems for him.

If programming is a career you are going for I would reconsider. If it is just a mandatory class you have to take, well good luck.

Yes, these are all very simple problems, answering questions like 'how do while loops work' are one thing, but posting entire programs and say how do I do this.. you won't learn that way, and yes you do get stuck, but that's how you learn to recognize mistakes in the future.

Going to agree with Tenks on the career assessment.

[Dinthug]

Exactly what I was saying... If you really need to ask these questions, you really aren't trying hard enough. Trust me, I've been there. Read your textbook, everything is there. Leave the desperation "please help me" threads for your final projects or you won't learn anything.

[Kuriin]

Hay guys, update. Thanks for the people who've helped me. I'm still going in the class and we have our midterm today. The hardest lab thus far to date is nesting a while loop (I had to use a do while, but later used a regular while loop). The next lab is calling methods, but I've looked through the book and it doesn't look as bad as the previous lab.

I've been doing each and every lab over and over until I can get them done in less than 4 minutes with no syntax, logical, or run-time errors.


PS, that previous program I posted (the LONG and complete one) was just me posting a finalized program to show that I finally managed to get it. There were no errors in the program, was just happy, haha.

edit: The hardest thing that I've gone through (well two things) is 1) Fulfilling an algorithm in my head before programing and 2) Indenting correctly so it's readable. When I stop and take a moment before I code to think "What is this going to do?" I typically have no issues, lol.

[Fog]

Is this really how they teach introductory computer science classes in college? Who could learn programming from scratch when the first program they see is something like

public class MyName
{
public static void main(String [] args)
{
System.out.println("My name is Stephen");

}
}

and they don't have a hope of understanding what the hell is going on in four fifths of the code? This seems insane to me. I'm not surprised that the end result appears to be such a struggle to understand.

[slitz]

Originally Posted by Fog

Stuff

Well since the above is needed, it's kinda hard to not include it in a Java class. Remove the "System...." line and you got the absolute minimum syntax for a runnable Java program.
But normally Java isn't the first programming language you learn however, so those steps aren't that hard when you actually start learning Java.

[Fog]

Originally Posted by slitz

Well since the above is needed, it's kinda hard to not include it in a Java class. Remove the "System...." line and you got the absolute minimum syntax for a runnable Java program.
But normally Java isn't the first programming language you learn however, so those steps aren't that hard when you actually start learning Java.

Right, and as a result I guess I just find it surprising that people start by learning Java. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but it just seems like if you start with this big framework of stuff which you don't really understand, it makes it easy to rationalize "well maybe I'm not really supposed to understand this thing, or this other thing either; I'll just try to learn how to use them and leave the understanding for later." There's no reason you shouldn't be able to understand everything when you're working with computers.

[Hachima]

Originally Posted by slitz

Well since the above is needed, it's kinda hard to not include it in a Java class. Remove the "System...." line and you got the absolute minimum syntax for a runnable Java program.
But normally Java isn't the first programming language you learn however, so those steps aren't that hard when you actually start learning Java.

The three university programs I'm familiar with all start with Java as their intro languages. It's not that uncommon to use it as a first language now days.

[slitz]

Originally Posted by Fog

stuff

No I totally agree. I think it's bullshit to start out with a OOP language in fact since there is just too much additional concepts to learn + the general programming logics. A lot better (well in my opinion) to go for a functional programming language (APL, Erlang, Haskell, Lisp etc) to learn the logics and when done move to a OOP language like C++/Java/C# so you can actually focus on what's important about these languages (design).

Originally Posted by Hachima

The three university programs I'm familiar with all start with Java as their intro languages. It's not that uncommon to use it as a first language now days.

That sounds rather odd (I do believe you though, just find it odd). It basically means that you don't know much about Java then even after 5-6 courses which could be quite misleading for employers.

[Tenks]

Its true, my university starts students off with Java as well.

I work with mostly interns/co-op students at my job [to be fair I'm also an intern.] I can attest that 90% of people who say they have Java knowledge (ie: they have 3-4 college classes) could not program their way out of a brown paper bag. Maybe it is not that bad, but I would estimate 7/10 interns that come in do not understand even basic Java. Let alone know how to go about solving a complex problem.

I was one of the lucky ones. I came from a pretty wealthy school district and was doing HTML in 8th/Fresh grade, VB6 in Soph/Junior and C++ in Senior. Laying down fundamental programming concepts is what these schools need to do instead of jumping head first into programming syntax. Syntax is easy to learn, problem solving is what real programming is.

[Hachima]

No way would I suggest 5-6 courses before even covering OOP. Thats an intro class topic. I think one problem with with a lot of CS programs is that they may teach computer programming but they don't teach software development. You may learn a lot of theory but you don't learn as much about real life, enterprise level projects.

For example there was a post in this forum about a project that came from a 4th year Ohio state class. It was to create a DB system for an online book store. This was something I did as a 2nd semester student though (not even first year)

We used ORM diagrams to define our DB schema. We used MVC pattern to seperate the gui/business and data access layers of our application(Sun calls it Model 2). We had requirements documents, use cases and nunit testing in place among other things.

This is the type of stuff that a lot of CS programs just briefly cover, and a lot of companies have a problem with having to train new graduates to get them up to speed.

This was just the second quarter of the CS program, so after finishing the program the whole development process was just second nature.

[slitz]

Originally Posted by Hachima

No way would I suggest 5-6 courses before even covering OOP. Thats an intro class topic.

I didn't mean you should take 5-6 java courses before OOP, I mean you could in theory take 5-6 java courses without touching real OOP princples (I'm not only talking about Objects, methods and inheritence).
Say for instance you take courses that learn you Swing, Java 2D/3D, networking, JDBC and JME. These are basically just courses learning you the API and you really don't need any knowledge what so ever of the more advanced topics on OOP in java, and yet you can show off with a paper that includes 5-6 java courses. Learning the API is probably better doing alone as well instead of having a teacher trying to point you at the correct classes / methods in the libraries.
That's what I meant, I didn't mean one should take 5-6 courses before learning OOP, I meant one should have a basic understanding on programming logics (well IMO) before venturing into OOP.

Originally Posted by Hachima

For example there was a post in this forum about a project that came from a 4th year Ohio state class. It was to create a DB system for an online book store. This was something I did as a 2nd semester student though (not even first year)

We actually did this in haskell on our first semester, which I wouldn't recommend anyone doing 8) (well not online bookstore, just a local book DB)

[Fog]

I don't think that OOP is an intro class topic. Before you learn OOP, you ought to be familiar with functional programming, because otherwise you won't understand why OOP exists. It'll just seem like needless added complexity, and you'll end up butchering OOP and writing fake-OOP functional programs where classes are nothing more than wrappers. (Which is to say, I've seen lots of code like that, and I bet this is how it comes about.)

[Zippygoose]

Originally Posted by Fog

I don't think that OOP is an intro class topic. Before you learn OOP, you ought to be familiar with functional programming, because otherwise you won't understand why OOP exists. It'll just seem like needless added complexity, and you'll end up butchering OOP and writing fake-OOP functional programs where classes are nothing more than wrappers. (Which is to say, I've seen lots of code like that, and I bet this is how it comes about.)

This is an excellent point. I can remember sitting in a Freshman year OO concepts class and thinking-"Man this polymorphism shit is totally useless!"

I think the difficulty lies in the fact that an application a beginner would write is almost always in and of itself simplistic-and the entire basis of OO programming is the ability to take a large and complex problem and organize it into managable and reusable code. I mean how many times were you writing out prototypes for your "hello world" program and cursing the prof for all of this pesky "busy work"? That was me every day.