My Professor Thinks He's God
I signed up to a course about the C# programming language and Object Oriented Programming principles this semester, as it is my final semester in university and I heard very good things about the course from people who took it. To the non-programmers in the crowd, don't worry - you will not need to know a singular thing about programming to understand the contents of this post. Because that would imply we actually learnt anything about programming in this course.
The first week I walk into the class, and notice it is packed full. There's barely any space to sit and a few people need to sit next to the wall rather than in front of a table. Our professor comes in, introduces himself, and quickly mentions how he has a problem with people having their phones or laptops out as it distracts him and "shows disrespect for the teacher." I take notes on my laptop, so I decide to close it for now and just open it again when he says something valuable to jot down.
I will not be opening my laptop for another 45 minutes.
In our first lesson (2:30 hours total), we spent around 30 minutes discussing how to "properly format" an email sent to the professor1, another 15 minutes in various lectures about respect, about 45 minutes talking about how C# is, in his words, "the objectively best programming language" along with why C# not being the most popular programming language is actually fine. He brought up the prime minister, Tesla, plagiarism, and whether popularity equals quality before he would bring up anything related to actual programming. In the entire lecture we went over four slides, all of which are syllabus slides. He told us how every week he'd give us about 2 hours of self-studying, and how the homework assignments should take 5~6 hours per week. I still do not know what C# does.
In the second lesson we spent an hour and a half on how to properly name a variable which, thank god, is actually relevant to programming. Now the programmers in the crowd may be going "hey, that's actually a very important topic!" which I would agree with if not for the fact we didn't actually learn how to properly name a variable. An hour of that hour and a half will be spent 'debating' the same unfortunate girl because she decided to answer a single question poorly at the start of the lesson, another 30 minutes will be spent on calculating how much time programmers lose a month by improperly naming variables, and then we will be shown one (1) (uno) (👆) example of a properly named variable.
After a lunch break where everyone looks equally miserable, he will finally show us a C# program he wrote! This C# program only exists to allow him to segue into an actual debate with a strawman he constructed about how C# is better than C++. To those who don't know - C++ is, among other things, a faster language than C# and is used when execution speed is a factor of concern. Our professor will look us dead in the eye, and with a straight face, tell us that C# runs faster than C++ (a lie), and that if it doesn't, execution speed (a very important thing in major corporations and infrastructures) is not important, outright stating that "if your employer cares about execution speed, find a new employer."
After the end of the first lesson I already was a bit horrified as to what the rest of my year was going to look like and needed to vent it at someone. One of my close friends is also a programmer, and is in fact a little obsessed with a certain programming language2 that he shills on every opportunity he gets. I figured that he would be the perfect person to talk about this class with.
This is the first message he sends me following my rant:
Your sample size of pretentious-about-a-language programmer was me until now. Welcome to the C programmers. They're a million times worse.
You will find that for each person who is passionate about rust there are at least three equally-if-not-more insane people about C, C++, or C#
Lord almighty give me strength.