Xref: utzoo comp.object:182 comp.lang.c++:5036 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!amara!orenda!des From: des@orenda.amara.uucp (Dave Steinhoff) Newsgroups: comp.object,comp.lang.c++ Subject: Remarks on the Wiener/Pinson Tutorial on C++ at OOPSLA'89 Message-ID: Date: 13 Oct 89 22:11:55 GMT Sender: des@amara.UUCP Distribution: na Organization: Applied Dynamics Int'l Lines: 126 I am submitting this on behalf of another person at my company, Uwe Pleban, with whom I attended OOPSLA '89 in New Orleans. These are remarks concerning the Advanced C++ tutorial taught by Dr's. Wiener and Pinson. The format below follows that of the tutorial feedback form distributed to the tutorial attendees. -------------------------------------------------- General Remarks --------------- I have taught for more than 10 years at the university level, have taught tutorials myself, and have been to several tutorials in the past 3 years. I have had a number of bad "being taught" experiences in my life, but none can compare to this tutorial. Anything above abysmal would be unwarranted. I feel that my company was cheated out of $260 for a completely worthless and distasteful experience. Where do we write to get our money back? Below are more specific comments. Re: 2. Content -------------- The tutorial was at the intermediate level at best. Indeed, after about one hour, one of the participants asked "Why are we going through all this preliminary stuff?" The answer "to establish terminology" was a bit absurd. At most 15 minutes would have sufficed to do exactly that. The organization of the tutorial notes was incredibly poor. It reminded me of a saying of one of my Math professors that "Math is usually taught by hopping from lemma to lemma." The authors hopped from boring subsection to boring subsection, with each subsection of the form - syntactic/semantic/pragmatic rule for C++ - sample class(es) - sample main program - sample test output (although with some examples, the test output was deleted or shortened, and it was no longer clear whether it was actual output, or simply wishful thinking). This is a rather inane way of presenting material to reasonably intelligent beings. There was no discussion of concepts, at least not in the notes. After the first 90 minutes, I had worked through most of the notes myself, while the lecturers droned on at a snail's pace. I then decided that the tutorial was a complete waste of my time, because nothing of conceptual interest seemed to be part of the tutorial, and there is considerably better material available in bookstores, such as the book by Lippman. The major shortcoming of the tutorial was that it provided absolutely no guidance concerning the use of C++ for software construction. Since the language is large, has redundant features, and embodies OOP concepts in a unique way, an advanced tutorial should have focussed on what to do and what not to do when using the language. How do you use certain features to organize class libraries? How do you ensure reusability? What is considered dangerous? What about portability? Instead, in his opening remarks, one of the speakers talked about irrelevant efficiency issues at the microscopic level. The material was not developed for this tutorial, but rather cut and pasted together from another two day course on C++. The speakers spent some time explaining why sections 1, 2, and 8 were missing from the notes; that they had problems with the printers, who kept asking for missing sections, etc. This illustrated "code reuse" at its worst. One of the most irritating "features" of the materials was that all examples were tested with the alpha-version of the AT&T cfront V2.0 translator. Consequently, there were numerous remarks by the speakers to change examples, ignore commentary concerning erroneous constructions, etc. My favorite example concerns the main program on page 54, which we were told to safely ignore, because all the erroneous constructs were no longer erroneous with the final version of the translator. Why was the material not brought up-to-date for the tutorial? The examples were tested in June of this year, and the tutorial was in October! Re: 4. Presentation ------------------- Neither speaker was effective. Dr. Pinson spoke in a monotonous voice, which could barely be heard over the hum of the central air system. He seemd to be very insecure concerning C++ language features, and repeatedly passed questions on to Dr. Wiener. Dr. Pinson seemed to be easily rattled by any question which did not directly refer to material he had just presented. Dr. Wiener was clearly the better speaker, but with the poorly organized material, even Jesse Jackson could not have saved the day! Visual materials? What visual materials? I cannot understand why there were no overhead transparencies. The explanation that this would eliminate "the shuffling of plastic slides in response to questions" is a bit absurd. Instead, the style of presentation often reduced to "as you can see on line 6 of listing 3.8 on page 43, which reads ...". How boring can you get? Re: 5. Details -------------- Best feature: I now know that I do not have to bother looking at any of the Wiener/Pinson books concerning OOP/Smalltalk/C++. Did I get my money's worth? Absolutely not! I feel very strongly about getting a partial reimbursement for the fee, which is exorbitant for such a poorly executed tutorial. Feedback for the tutorials committee: Get together with the speakers and "test drive" them. That should eliminate substandard performances such as the one by Wiener and Pinson. Uwe Pleban, Ph.D. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dave Steinhoff Applied Dynamics International des@amara.UUCP 3800 Stone School Rd. ...uunet!amara!des Ann Arbor, Mi 48108 -------------------------------------(313)973-1300-----------------