I've once had a course involving programming and the lecturer rewrote the code, which we were usually using at our institute, making ALL variables global. - Yes, also each and every loop counter and iterator. 🤪

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago (3 children)

There’s no way you teach a uni course and do this kind of thing unless to demonstrate poor practice/run time difference. Are you sure you were paying attention?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Yes. He really thought it was efficient and would avoid errors if literally all variables were defined in a single Matlab function he called at the beginning of the script. We students all thought: "Man, are you serious?" As we didn't want to debug such a mess, in our code, we ignored what he was doing and kept using local variables.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ah I misread I thought it was specifically a programming course. I can expect this from a math prof.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yes, it was a course on finite deformation material models. And no, you do really, really not want to declare each and every variable in your material subroutine globally for the whole finite element program.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Lecturers at universities tend to have little to no industry experience at all.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Productive research is also hard to imagine with such coding practice either.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

That's why when your job hires new people right out of college they have no idea what they're doing and now must be trained how to actually do the job. "What, you mean we aren't writing this enterprise application in python!?"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I've seen two teachers do this, both of them mathematics professors who teach programming for the extra cash. One uses C, the other Pascal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Oh they were paying, way too much