I'm smoking so hard that I failed a basic assignment

Heh, if sleep deprivation is the cause of it I'm screwed! I have had perpetual insomnia for virtually all my life. If I get 5 hours of sleep in a week I'm happy.

That said, it never really affected me much. I actually seem to do better the longer I go without sleep. Yes, I'm not normal.

 

Two days before I had to hand in my third year project (a PLD shell to PIC compiler) it still wasn't working, found it that night, it turned out that I had mis-understood the spec of the chip I was using. It had two register banks, which I read as it having X registers per bank, however what I didn't read was that most of the registers in the second bank were a mirror of the first bank, so I had half as many registers as I thought it had. I had to strip my program down and seriously reduce the functionality. In the presentation I was able to explain this and had enough working to convince them that with a bigger chip you could do more.



We all make mistakes, just learn from them and don't do it again.

CC

 

Don't worry man, at least you didn't sleep through an exam and get 0.

MuFu.

 

We all make mistakes, that forms part of our experience. You learn from them to hopefully make sure you don't make the same mistakes twice.

I've make mistakes in my own programming silly things I really shouldn't done but still ended up doing it anyway. I'd probably be here ages if I tried to remember and write down all the silly mistakes I've made in some of my assignments.

As for advice:

1. If you really get stuck on a problem go away from it for a while and come back to it. Sometimes I find I need a break before I can go back to trying to solve a problem. I've come back sometimes and spotted the silly mistakes that I've made which I just couldn't see earlier.

2. I wouldn't recommend this for everyone but what I would do occasionally is write sections of my program onto paper and carefully go through and ensure the program is doing what it is supposed to do in your head.

Mind you recursion always confused me no end when doing this. Don't get me started on Scheme or Z. I found both of those to be incredibly frustrating.

Anyway sometimes you'll catch things when you go to write your program code to paper (for me these were more often or not the silly mistakes I tended to make).

3. As someone said earlier test, test, test, test. You can never do enough testing in my opinion.

4. Never leave anything to the last minute ( I learnt this from my 'A' level Computing project)...

I hope that helps.

 

Agreed Never leave anything for the last minute especially if you are going to attempt to try to solve the problem in a wierd way.

Also remember to document.
// is your friend

I got a 75 on one of my assignments because i decided that i was going to save memory and convert everything to binary for my arbitrary length integer. It used booleans to represent bits and wasn't particularly efficient but still it was a blast to program and it also gave me a chance to make up some interesting algorithms yet starting it 36 hrs before the due date was horrible as i lost tons of points for stupid stuff. So yeah your beating yourself up for stupid mistakes but everyone makes them.

Also another thing that helps in colllege comp sci: offer to help other people, usually talking it out and trying to explain the complicated parts to other people will bring the whole problem together in your head. though dont steal code.

Have Fun

 

Hey I've just spent the last couple of days going nuts over some simple Javascript. The Problem? I forget Array pointers started at zero and the loop counter I put in didn't. Hence a couple days of 'error at line 23: Object Expected'

D'OH!!!

Everybody makes mistakes, accept it, learn from it and try not to get too hung up on it.

 

K.I.L.E.R,.... always remember.

School is not the real world.

Getting a bad grade sucks (and your grades were not that bad).

But getting fired or loosing a client is worse.

School is the place where you can make mistakes in a reasonably consequence free environment.

Not to mention the fact that you are young. You are supposed to make stupid mistakes. If you didnt do that now, you would have to make up for it in later life, when the stakes were higher.


Get used to mistakes,.. even stupid ones like this. They will happen to you all your life (and anyone who tells you different is an arrogant liar).

Best thing that can be done is to learn from those mistakes. Otherwise they arent worth the effort.

And as far as becoming a better coder.

Learn to "read" code.

I don't mean, being able to comprehend the tokens and keywords, like some fleshy lexical analyzer.

But really "read" code.

The idea is that you will find that you can almost "execute" it in your head. Your code will then be much more deliberate, and calculated.


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if you are really concerned Kiler perhaps you should talk to your dean of students/professor or some one in the position to hear you out. You'd be surprised at the things you can resolve.