ICA-CP: 10/10/07

This posting for our October 10th class is a little late. But, I want to make sure these ideas are very, very clear. As I said in class, I was disappointed that some programmers in our class just copied others' Karel assignments 1-6 and turned them into me as their own. I could tell from timestamps, mistakes made, files sizes, etc. So, I'm going to summarize again what I said in class about the differences between CASE, pair programming, and plargarism.

CASE, which we all know stands for Copy And Steal Everything, is my term for a very legitimate coding practice of creating code for reusabability. In other words, programmers don't want to reinvent the wheel each time they write programs. So, they start with code created previously and then modify for the new use. They might borrow code from someone else, but for major programs they acknowledge the source of the borrowed code in comments and then make it their own with modifications. We will see this in greater complexity when we cover extending a class in Java next semester.

Pair Programming is a collaborative team environment with the basic concept of sharing ideas and helping each other. In Pair Programming, two programmers work on a single program. We create a collaborative working environment in class where helping each other with ideas is encouraged. However, sharing is encouraged in order to help another understand and then use a concept in coding a programming. It is not giving someone your program to plagarize.

It all goes back to critical thinking. As I keep saying in class, I want you to understand how to think about programming. If you understand and not just memorize, the concepts underlying computer programming, you may forget about the Java language in two or three years, but you will know how to analyze, problem solve, and create solutions to different kinds of computer related issues. Since computers are everywhere in our daily life, this may entail figuring out something very practical some day -- like how to restart the computer in your car so the doors will open and you can exit it. (See http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=43493 to find out about a BMW trapped the finance minister of Thailand.)