# What part of computer-science do you remember as difficult at (high)school ?



## Alain De Vos (Apr 19, 2021)

For me this was a P vs. NP problem. It was related somewhere to pons cards, with pins and holes, and readers. With tapes you see in old sci-fi movies.


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## drhowarddrfine (Apr 19, 2021)

We didn't have such classes in high school at least before 2000. In the US, that's 14 to 18-year old students.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Apr 19, 2021)

When I quit school in 10th Grade they had just come out with pocket calculators and adding machines had hand cranks on the side. But I had an abacus.

There was no such thing as computers in schools and a computer class to teach people how to use one too slow coming for me.

I saw this Terminal thingy people were using on TV and Movies and that was what computer use was in my mind. I wanted to be that geeky guy, because chicks dig pocket protectors, and I was geeked out on the inside and didn't even know it.

I'm not at all impressed with the computer knowledge of a guy in my building who has a Degree in Computer Science - Communications. I've seen a lot of smart people in A.I. forums though.


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## Alain De Vos (Apr 19, 2021)

Being junior. I have a vague memory of being 16.  And 8-inch floppy's disks at school. A terminal with green or orange letters running some pre-microsoft o.s.


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## ct85711 (Apr 19, 2021)

Computer Sciences was barely starting to be taught in high school for me; as most schools were still on Apple IIe to 386 level computers.  So the few teachers that taught using computers barely was able to teach Basic programming.  After high school, the most difficult on computer science I had was with big O notation.

I do wish they taught more vector math than only 2 days (strictly using calculator, didn't teach how they are solved otherwise).


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## gpw928 (Apr 19, 2021)

My computer science education started at university.

The structure of the course work in the first year included logic, boolean algebra (with Karnaugh maps), number theory, and assembly language.

Most of that didn't need a computer.  It was a great start.  Knowing how computers work at a basic level provides a strong foundation.

The single book that had most influence on my career was _Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code_. It's been in legal print for some time now.
​


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## jasonvp (Apr 28, 2021)

Comp Sci didn't begin for me until university as well.  I graduated university in '95 to give you a point of reference.  The most difficult thing was the advanced algorithms course.  During my entire time writing code in school, I never sat down and planned it out.  There was no conscious effort thrown at coming up with algorithms.  I just wrote.  And it just worked.  So the work involved with understanding algorithms from a mathematical sense just caused my brain to SIGSEGV.

I'm certainly not trying to downplay their importance.  Nor am I trying to imply I was some sort of savant (HA!)  I wasn't.  It's that the challenges in college weren't really difficult enough for me to have to sit and work it all out mathematically like that.  I just... did it.


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## SirDice (Apr 28, 2021)

Understood boolean algebra better than numerical algebra. Always have and still do. Boolean logic is my natural state, it works or it doesn't. Assembler was easy, probably because I was already bit banging my C64 long before I was taught anything computer related at school. So it was fairly easy to switch to 6809 we used at school, it's almost the same as 6502/6510 (few registers are different and the 6809 had direct page instead of the 6502's zero page). Quickly moved up to 32 bit code with the 68000, just more and bigger registers. The programming language of choice being taught at school was Pascal. Never liked it. But maybe it was because we we're forced to use Turbo Pascal on an PC emulator running on an Amiga. Which ran at a snail's pace. At the same time we were coding Amiga demos in 68000 assembler during those classes. Heck my final project was coded in 68000 using the Amiga's native Intuition library (had graphics, windows, menus, and all) instead of having to code some text based interface up in Pascal that had to run on that horridly slow PC emulator to read some data from a CPU board over serial.


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## Crivens (Apr 28, 2021)

The hardest part was forcing meself not to slack off so much that I could not catch up to the actual state in a 1-2 day burst. And that was different for all topics. I had a lot of juggeling to do there. 
From the understanding part, the hardest was number theory. It simply does not translate to my inner language.


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## ShelLuser (Apr 28, 2021)

Back in my days (sjeesj I sound old now ) there hardly were any IT science classes. The best you could get were studies for common applications at that time such as WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, etc.  Though the latter two would also involve basic programming / scripting. Especially dBase which even had its own programming language called Clipper which was used to build such applications.

And well, Novell networking was also taught, back in the Coax days  

Anyway, around 85' / 90' I eventually found an education which specialized at teaching IT usage within corporate busineses; it got cut into 2 parts: 2 days of theory classes where you'd get the whole advanced kaboodle (from English, Dutch to Economics and even database design) and then we had 3 days of practical "training" in an office like environment. Here we were basically given the option to study the theory lessons with real hardware. It was really cool, I had the time of my life.

_Also_ because I was already pretty well versed with computers (I started messing with a C64 around 78', managed to buy my own around 84'). In fact, a school friend and me were so well familiar with the whole thing that we managed to get ahead of schedule big time and halfway through we actually ran out of study material; we had finished the whole lot with high grades and now had very little to do!

That is...  we didn't have any problems finding stuff to do; we soon started helping our fellow students who sometimes had a hard time with some of the assignments. At first this raised a few eyebrowes with the teachers at hand but we both promised that we would *never* try and help anyone cheat but instead we'd only limit ourselves to explaining any underlying theory to try and help the others understand the fundementals.... My friend and I lived computers, especially during those times, and we already knew and practiced the "Give a man a fish..." principle, we strongly believed in that. Heck, we were living proof of it; we definitely didn't know everything we got taught at first but we had a solid understanding of the basics.

So, the most difficult part of it all?  That was also the most challenging part: explaining what you know in such a way so that others can actually understand and follow what you're talking about. Sounds easy, sure, and maybe cliched but honestly...  if you know something by heart and can pretty much visualize or dream what it's all about then it will also become very easy to take certain parts for granted. For me that was really something to get used to: helping a fellow student out with, say, chapter 9 didn't mean you could just assume that they knew everything they needed from chapter 5. For me that was a real eye opener and I learned a lot from the whole experience.

But yeah, it also provided (educational!) issues. At one point in time my friend and me actually got to take the final exams / tests early because it would make everyone's lives easier. We then helped the staff with improving their lessons. For example...  we were taught that if you removed a file (on the FAT filesystem) then both allocation copies would be blanked _as well as the actual file contents_. That part was of course nonsense, but that was in the official study material and thus that is what the students were taught. My friend and me helped re-write a lot of that so that it would actually match reality.

Yah, but while we were working on that project our fellow students / class mates would also often turn to us for help. It wasn't an uncommon sight that we were sitting behind our computers with a small line of fellow students next to us who wanted to ask us something about the material. Most even preferred asking us for help than turning to the actual teachers!    (who really didn't mind because now they could concentrate on more stuff to do).

Why keep standing in line instead of waiting for someone to leave our desks? Because most students would love to hear us explain stuff to other students because that would often also help them fill in some missing blanks.

Anyway, best study and best teachers I ever had, really...  Because those guys were true professionals and could even admit being wrong about something (like that FAT example I mentioned above; at first our teacher wouldn't believe me when I stated that the data remained on the data carrier, but he had to admit (which he did!) when I demonstrated the whole thing after school hours using Norton Disk Doctor).

What was supposed to be a study in computer science, network administration and database programming also managed to teach me a lot about (elementary) project management, presentations, teaching & explaining and that working for 8 hours seemed long enough but if you're actually doing (elementary) teaching then it's far from enough if you plan on "teaching" (= explaining stuff) _and_ working on educational material.


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## bobmc (Apr 28, 2021)

I bought the book "Practical Common Lisp" and got stuck at macros so I give up. It was not practical for me.


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## Alain De Vos (Apr 28, 2021)

LISP can indeed be brain-gymnastiek.


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## msplsh (Apr 28, 2021)

Getting any useful documentation for APIs


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## Deleted member 30996 (Apr 29, 2021)

ct85711 said:


> Computer Sciences was barely starting to be taught in high school for me; as most schools were still on Apple IIe to 386 level computers.


The first computer I laid fingertips on was an AppleII in '93. They gave me my own floppy disk like I knew what I was doing and I wasn't about to tell them different.

That was on a Friday afternoon when I showed for work as a weekend houseparent at a Group Home on a new job. When I got off Monday morning I had figured it out due to my familiarity with video game menus, accessed all the data on their floppy disks and printed out what I wanted to keep. 

But the only thing worth keeping was a funny love poem a girl had secretely written the guy who took over for me from 10pm to 6am to embarrass him.


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## bookwormep (Apr 29, 2021)

...Ah, need to step into the time machine here...Central H.S. of Minneapolis, when it was still in session. Yes, the same H.S. as our dearest and sorely missed musician Prince attended in his youth.

There were some pretty brilliant kids attending the school as I recall, one of these classmates created a model of an electrical switch network that performed boolean arithmetic; using a 6 foot by 3 foot folding table with a vast array of electrical switches.

To me this was difficult, because I could do higher mathematics; but not the calculation of electric logic and math circuits. It affected me so that a lesson in binary arithmetic was necessary. And so it begins….


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## Crivens (Apr 29, 2021)

Alain De Vos said:


> LISP can indeed be brain-gymnastiek.


And when you ask for practical uses, the prof writes out 6 lines of (dense) code and gives you the proof of that lzh encoder as a homework... lisp has a hate/love spot in me since then.


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## rootbert (Apr 29, 2021)

definitely: physics at my university. all that high frequency stuff, physics theorems and calculations for circuit/chip design and telecom - A/D stuff etc.


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## covacat (Apr 29, 2021)

implementing the simplex algorithm in cobol


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## Crivens (Apr 29, 2021)

covacat said:


> implementing the simplex algorithm in cobol


What does the geneva convention say to that?


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## covacat (Apr 29, 2021)

Crivens said:


> What does the geneva convention say to that?


commies ruled us back then so nobody cared about geneva


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## vermaden (Apr 29, 2021)

> What part of computer-science do you remember as difficult at (high)school?


Useless math subjects that I NEVER used in my entire life - only wasted time for them.

Actually I still wait to use _short multiplication formula_ - *(a+b)^2* - at least ONCE in my life - up till now I NEVER needed it. Ever.

They also made _Philosophy_ lessons MANDATORY where I was studying _Computer Science_. Also wasted time for me.


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## Crivens (Apr 29, 2021)

vermaden said:


> They also made _Philosophy_ lessons MANDATORY where I was studying _Computer Science_. Also wasted time for me.


Be happy. These days, critical race theory is creeping into STEM.


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## vermaden (Apr 29, 2021)

Crivens said:


> Be happy. These days, critical race theory is creeping into STEM.


Could You tell what _critical race theory_ is? I never heard of it.


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## Alain De Vos (Apr 29, 2021)

Well it happened to me as teacher someone telling me the words I was not allowed to use, even if I used medical words in medical context ...
It smelled like ...


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## neal (Apr 30, 2021)

Now I feel old as there were no computer classes of any kind when I was at school. We did have a few computers though, which I always tried to use at lunch time. No one seem to be allowed to use the PET and I was always too slow for the TRS-80, so it was the RML 380Z for me. All it had was a simple monitor, so I had to carry around a cassette with BASIC on. I learnt by asking other people how to program and in the end I actually gave a lesson on BASIC in maths class as only one teacher had ever used a computer before and I seemed to know what I was doing by then apparently.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Apr 30, 2021)

Crivens said:


> Be happy. These days, critical race theory is creeping into STEM.


You're guilty. I'm guilty.

That's all there is to it. Or so they say.


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## astyle (Apr 30, 2021)

I went to high school back in the 90s, in US, and yes, we did have computer science education in high school back then. The hard-looking part was C++ programming. I did some programming in BASIC at the time, and C++ kinda scared me off. I ended up taking a Multimedia class (learning about computer workflows of professional TV studios, how they prep footage for broadcast on TV).

In college, the hard part was not the math, but automation of version control.

One thing that's still flabbergasting to me is 'Kernel Debugging Boot Camp for kids' stuff that I sometimes see announcements about. As if there's crowds of pre-teen kids who actually know enough about the Linux kernel and can not only spot a bug after staring at a screenful of code for less than 3 minutes, but also know how to fix it , as in  type in a correction, make sure it compiles, make sure the problem is actually solved, make sure it does not introduce new bugs in the process, create a diff patch, submit it to camp counselor... I once followed up on such a camp's results - and they said that they 'quashed nearly 300 bugs' after a week.


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