[unalone]

Perhaps I'm young, but right now I can't imagine not having free time. I mean, no matter what I do, I want to make sure that I'm doing it by choice. The only thing I don't like is being put on rails and made to do things that I don't see the point of.

Right now, I'm learning Processing in one class. I'm not learning anything new about language: I already know Java. Processing isn't used as much, and from what I've seen it's not doing anything that I want to do. We learned Scratch, which is a childish language, and ActionScript, which I've already worked with. I love learning new things; what I don't love is being in a place where I'm not learning and have to do busywork, while I have an idea and think I can mess with it. If that goes wrong, I'll know enough to find a program that teaches me exactly the thing that I go wrong with, and next time I'll be more prepared.

[timr]

Not to sound too condescending, but part of the goal of higher education is to expose you to things for which you can't see an immediate application. Your perspective is small; your professors' perspective is much larger. They're trying to teach you concepts, not languages.

That's not to say everything that you study will be meaningful and exciting. There's tons of busywork in college (especially in the first few quarters, when they're bringing the slow kids up to speed), but that's life! If you think you're going to escape busywork by starting a company, you're being naive.

More to the point, if the stuff you're studying is so boring and unrewarding that it makes you want to quit, then you've got plenty of time to work on side projects while things get more interesting. That's where the free time comes from!

[Elepsis]

Back when I took my intro to CS class, it was taught in Scheme. I hated this at the time -- and bitched about it constantly. "When am I ever going to need this language that isn't used for anything, and that has such a fucked up syntax))))))?"

Looking back on it now (and having had to implement many of the algorithms we learned about in that class in C, Java and other languages that are less suited for it), I wouldn't have been able to grasp many of the sorting, binary tree or hashing algorithms nearly as easily in another language.

To my own surprise, one of the things that I now consider most valuable about my undergrad degree was that it forced me to at least grasp Scheme and Smalltalk.

[unalone]

Not condescending at all! This is why I love Hacker News: there are so many people worth listening to and they take their time to talk.