[joshstrange]

I took a database design class in college. I had been using MySQL for years at this point (by no means an expert, but databases weren’t foreign to me).

In my first exam I got a 90/100. I got all the queries right (don’t get me started on programming/writing queries on paper and how stupid that is), but I lost 1 point on each of the 10 questions. Why? Because I didn’t put a semicolon at the end of my query. Something I had never done in any database tool, never done in my code, and only done 1-2 times on the CLI if that.

IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places. Teaching things 10+ years out of date by people who have a chip on this shoulder towards anything new. I had an EE professor who literally did not go a single class without find some way to denigrate web developers and “not real developers”. Fun times.

[sensanaty]

It's been a while since I've touched SQP, and most of my experience is with psql, but as far as I can recall if you type commands into the psql console without a semicolon the commands don't get executed properly?

Still a dumb reason to deduct points though

[joshstrange]

You are correct, on the command line you need it but pretty much every GUI tool and language binding auto-add it for you. It felt very nit-picky and not at all based in reality. I got all the joins/limits/order/where/etc correct, the semicolon doesn’t matter for what I felt the test should be actually testing on. Testing human’s ability to memorize or write perfect syntax when they will never do that unaided in reality is just silly.

[darknavi]

One of my professors would mark us down for each line of code that is over 80 characters.

What it really was was a forcing function to figure out auto formatting tools, so in the end I didn't mind.

[flutas]

> IMHO computer science in college is a joke at most places.

I hate to agree, but yeah.

I'm watching my husband go through a CS degree course right now, and the stuff he talks about I'm just like "why are they focusing on this, you literally never use this."

His "computer graphics" class was all about using the original GLUT library. The school specifically highlighted M1 Macs as good computers for their CS department students to use. Think about this combo for about 5s.

Yeah, the lib wasn't available in arm format...

[vsnf]

The incompatible library and overly expensive computer recommendations aside, CS is full of things "you literally never use". It's a theoretical discipline more akin to mathematics than anything else, and it certainly isn't software engineering, to the surprise of many students (including me, when I was one).

Outside of my university coursework, I have never used the Pumping Lemma (Theory of Computation), balanced a red-black tree (Algorithms & Data Structures), relational algebra (Databases), and all sorts of other things that someone focused on the software development aspect of computers would literally never use and would wonder why we're focusing so much on these things.