Computer Programming Majors

[Dingo Jellybean]

I must commend you people for taking such a tough major. I'm only taking an introductory program course and the programs that I have to write are incredibly tough. Maybe it's my professor, but who knows...I hate programming. That's why I stick with math. It's such a tough major, I'm sometimes surprised I'm able to actually complete these programs. I hear Physics is the toughest major, but Computer Science has to be the 2nd toughest. Not sure where math majors rank in terms of difficulty, but it probably doesn't register in the top 20. At least maybe that's my personal bias because I've always had a passion for math, but I never had a passion for programming, so that's why I hate it. I'm taking an intro C course and while the concepts are easy to understand, the programs are very difficult that it makes me feel like I'm at a 300 level class. I hate to imagine the difficulty of 200 and 400 level classes, but thank God I only have to take one CMSC course. This is the easiest programming course I can take and it's already giving me a TON of trouble.

With that said, I commend all Physics and Programming majors. My hats off to you folks who take on such a tough task.

[Meat Puppet]

I don't know what the hell a major in something something is, but I'm starting my computer programming course in march next year. Do I get a cookie?

[Baloki]

I wanted to do a Physics major but in the end I took the easy route out with computing... :(

Edit: Major is the next bit up from a degree if I remember rightly, that or it is a degree :D

[Faris]

Do I get a cookie?
yes you do :D :

:cookie: :cookie: :cookie:

[Flying Mullet]

I don't find it too hard, but like you said, it could be your professor. I was lucky and had fun professors in college that made programming enjoyable. That and many of my friends and I would set up study times in the labs to work on programs and that made homework A LOT easier when you're working with friends.

Also, programs can be very difficult to write when you can't figure out your professor's assignment. But that's what it's like in the real world. If you have poor requirements, documentation and design it makes it very difficult to write quality code. One because you can't tell what you should be writing; and two because if the planning was shoddy up front then people tend to try and change requirements on you as they realized they screwed up up front.

A degree is a more general recognition while the major is what you specialized in (at least in the US). For instance someone might persue a Computer Science major, but their degree could be a Bachelors in Science.

[Meat Puppet]

Oh, I think I'm doing a level 1 and level 2 degree next year and the year after that, or something like that. :whimper:

Or was it certificate? Certificate sounds crappier than degree.

Actually they're level 5 to 6 now. Stupid school, it's so confusing.

[SeeDRankLou]

Not sure where math majors rank in terms of difficulty, but it probably doesn't register in the top 20.
3-Dimensional Calculus is difficult on a scale that Physics could never be, and that's not even the most difficult of math skills. I am rather proficient with math (not bragging, just saying), and 3-D calc was really hard, and I am honestly a bit afraid of Linear Algebra and what lies beyond that. I'm not saying physics as a whole is easier or harder than math as a whole, but given how much they go hand in hand, I would put the two twenty spaces apart. In fact, I wouldn't put the two two spaces apart.

I was a computer programming major once. Honestly I found it rather boring and monotonous. I'm sure it got more interesting later, but the first few semesters really made me grow tired of it.

[Dingo Jellybean]

I don't find it too hard, but like you said, it could be your professor. I was lucky and had fun professors in college that made programming enjoyable. That and many of my friends and I would set up study times in the labs to work on programs and that made homework A LOT easier when you're working with friends.

Also, programs can be very difficult to write when you can't figure out your professor's assignment. But that's what it's like in the real world. If you have poor requirements, documentation and design it makes it very difficult to write quality code. One because you can't tell what you should be writing; and two because if the planning was shoddy up front then people tend to try and change requirements on you as they realized they screwed up up front.


I mean, I know what loops do and structures and arrays and all that...and I know what the professor wants. His program details are incredibly long, some of them are 20 pages describing what the program should do. He lists sample inputs and outputs, but he even told the class that since Maryland is dropping CMSC106 after this semester, he made the class "easier."

I hate to see how this class was like before this semester. But it is incredibly difficult because of the type of programs he expects us to write. I'm currently working on the 5th project: I'll give you a link to his project description. Go to:

www.cs.umd.edu/~larry/106webpage/

ID: Student Password: Election

Then click on projects, then project 5. I'm sure even veteran programmers would struggle with it.

I just hate the whole ordeal about programming, it's too much intricacies going on at once.

[Yamaneko]

I took some programming classes when I was in high school. I absolutely loathed them. Physics and Engineering are probably the hardest majors, though. I'm taking the easy way out and studying Criminal Justice, which focuses on fundamental science concepts and procedures in biology and chemistry. Most of my time is allocated studing administration techniques.

[Necronopticous]

I'm a programming major, yippie.

[Samuraid]

Programming is fun! :D

*runs and hides*

I'm a CPE major, so that would be about ½ computer science and ½ electrical engineering. But the programming side of things is so much more fun,

[Dr Unne]

CS is more integrated with mathematics than many people realize. After a certain point it's all number theory. Theory of computation, the Church-Turing thesis etc. "The computable functions are exactly the functions which can be calculated by a mechanical calculation device." That has some rather profound consequences. Also you can study encryption, which is 100% math. And there are P vs. NP problems. "Given a number X, is X prime?" As X gets bigger, the question either becomes exponentially harder to solve (in which case for a sufficiently large X, we're pretty much screwed), or else we just haven't found the right algorithm to solve it yet. No one knows which is the answer. There are problems that it's mathematically provable that no computer could solve, even with a billion years to attempt it. The logic of computers is directly applicable to everything. Studying computers often turns into studying the nature of knowledge itself. I'm not sure where to draw the line between computer science and philosophy, for example.

So far as the programming aspect of it, I find it enjoyable. Programming demands perfectionism, and that fits right in with my personality. It also demands an attention span that borders upon mental disease. Prolonged concentration for 8 or 10 hours at a time. Not everyone is going to find that kind of thing enjoyable. But it also lets you be creative, and it lets you create something useful. Programming is not an art, to me, but more like a craft; like a blacksmith, who fashions some tool by hand out of raw materials, and can take pride in the craftsmanship. (But without all the sweating.)

There is no such thing as a "hardest" major. Some things are easy for some people, some are easier for others. I find biology to be a very difficult subject. My roommates were in med school, and they memorized names and positions of body parts and chemical formulas and molecule structures 4 hours a night. I could never, ever have succeeded in that, because I can't stand constant memorization of random facts.

[Dingo Jellybean]

CS is more integrated with mathematics than many people realize. After a certain point it's all number theory. Theory of computation, the Church-Turing thesis etc. "The computable functions are exactly the functions which can be calculated by a mechanical calculation device." That has some rather profound consequences. Also you can study encryption, which is 100% math. And there are P vs. NP problems. "Given a number X, is X prime?" As X gets bigger, the question either becomes exponentially harder to solve (in which case for a sufficiently large X, we're pretty much screwed), or else we just haven't found the right algorithm to solve it yet. No one knows which is the answer. There are problems that it's mathematically provable that no computer could solve, even with a billion years to attempt it. The logic of computers is directly applicable to everything. Studying computers often turns into studying the nature of knowledge itself. I'm not sure where to draw the line between computer science and philosophy, for example.

So far as the programming aspect of it, I find it enjoyable. Programming demands perfectionism, and that fits right in with my personality. It also demands an attention span that borders upon mental disease. Prolonged concentration for 8 or 10 hours at a time. Not everyone is going to find that kind of thing enjoyable. But it also lets you be creative, and it lets you create something useful. Programming is not an art, to me, but more like a craft; like a blacksmith, who fashions some tool by hand out of raw materials, and can take pride in the craftsmanship. (But without all the sweating.)

There is no such thing as a "hardest" major. Some things are easy for some people, some are easier for others. I find biology to be a very difficult subject. My roommates were in med school, and they memorized names and positions of body parts and chemical formulas and molecule structures 4 hours a night. I could never, ever have succeeded in that, because I can't stand constant memorization of random facts.

Yeah, one of my math advisors told me that once I took some 400 level math classes, I'll see where this all relates to my teaching. Programming requires perfection just like math does, much like a missing semicolon can make a program unusuable, a missing minus sign in a problem can throw your answer completely off base. I actually think math is more like an art, except that the art is already created, it's figuring out the art that's the "art". That sounds wacky, but I'm a bit drowsy now.

As for "hardest" major, it's what U.S. News World lists as the toughest major according to polls. I only know they ranked Physics as the #1 toughest major. Like statistics, although it is a branch of mathematics, I cannot imagine myself keeping track of numbers...I've taken Biostatistics and did pretty well, but I had a lot more struggles in it than I thought. It's not really that I'm struggling in programming, it's more that I take far too long to think of a proper solution/algorithm to a program, and that takes away from my studies of other subjects. Because it takes me so long to think of a solution, I tend to struggle at it sometimes, but not too much so that I'm failing. I'll be glad if I get a B in this class, even though I had high hopes for an A.

[Azure Chrysanthemum]

I was going to go into Computer Programming until I finally admitted to myself that I suck at math and I hate it and I want nothing to do with it. Now I'm a journalism major, that's something I actually enjoy.

[Auronhart]

So far as the programming aspect of it, I find it enjoyable. Programming demands perfectionism, and that fits right in with my personality. It also demands an attention span that borders upon mental disease. Prolonged concentration for 8 or 10 hours at a time. Not everyone is going to find that kind of thing enjoyable. But it also lets you be creative, and it lets you create something useful. Programming is not an art, to me, but more like a craft; like a blacksmith, who fashions some tool by hand out of raw materials, and can take pride in the craftsmanship. (But without all the sweating.)

There is no such thing as a "hardest" major. Some things are easy for some people, some are easier for others. I find biology to be a very difficult subject. My roommates were in med school, and they memorized names and positions of body parts and chemical formulas and molecule structures 4 hours a night. I could never, ever have succeeded in that, because I can't stand constant memorization of random facts.
Yeah, I'm going to be in 3rd year computer science next year. The only annoying part about cs is that you have to do so much boring documentation. Math proofs are way harder. (a lot of fun too though)

[krissy]

my 231 prof writes our lecture notes on his dashboard, on a napkin, while his wife drives him to school and this is on the day these notes will be used


we had to do 7 assignemnts. 4 of them were making calculators.
i have been getting consecutive b-d marks on these.

mind you over the course of the semester i never wrote out any pseudocode or algorithms anywhere that were my own. : n\

edit: cpsc aint my major tho

[-N-]

You think programming is messed up; try building a chip that has to handle all your programs. *built a 32-bit MIPS*

[Dr Unne]

Circuit design is still a lot of programming too. For one of my classes I had to design a pipelined CPU that ran an ISA with variable-length instructions, i.e. some took more clock cycles than others. It's all still programming, it's just that the "language" you have to work with is rudimentary logic, wires and gates. So far as chip design, i.e. laying out a circuit onto a board and making it small and fast, I wouldn't know where to begin.

[Samuraid]

You think programming is messed up; try building a chip that has to handle all your programs. *built a 32-bit MIPS*

That is a lot of fun too.

It's one thing to write:
sum = 45838 - 3693;

It's another to just build a 32-bit ALU. :D

[-N-]

Circuit design is still a lot of programming too. For one of my classes I had to design a pipelined CPU that ran an ISA with variable-length instructions, i.e. some took more clock cycles than others. It's all still programming, it's just that the "language" you have to work with is rudimentary logic, wires and gates. So far as chip design, i.e. laying out a circuit onto a board and making it small and fast, I wouldn't know where to begin.
I see where you're coming from, but I see chip design as an architectural endeavor that uses micro/programming rather than the other way around. I can see it as both though, but then my head gets all confused. *shruggles*

It's another to just build a 32-bit ALU. :D
Yeah, and then make it useful by sticking it appropriately into the computer architecture. The ALU design project I had was kinda fun, though. :)