SEMESTER #4 AT UMASS

It's just today that I realized that every single class I'm taking this semester is useless.

Linguistics 101? I think the reason I thought I might like this class is my moderate interest in constructed languages, like Esperanto and Klingon. I made an effort to learn Esperanto from a book, but absorbed very little of the vocabulary. Mostly just grammatical rules.

So I thought, might be an interesting subject to learn about. And it is. But I can't think of a single place I'd use it.

Math 235, Linear Algebra. Again, I thought, "well, it deals with number matrixes, and those are kind of cool..." in that pseudo-math-nerd kind of way. I think some of these things are cool IF I can understand them. Most of these, I get right away. And when I can't figure it out, I start to ask if it could be used later in life. So far, the teacher (not a professor, mind you, unless Ms. Mairead Greene has become a professor in the one short year in between this class and my first semester here when, as a grad student, she taught me Calculus II) has done nothing -- absolutely nothing! -- to make me believe it is. Usually, with other branches of mathematics, like Algebra, or Trigonometry, or even the first parts of Calculus, you can at least fool me into thinking there's a practical use by giving me Word Problems. No such thing here.

Physics 152. This course covers electricity, magnetism, and the ideal gas law. All things that make great science fair projects, but don't really come in handy in the kind of office-setting job I'd eventually end up in.

I'd love to see a first-person shooter computer game incorporate these kind of concepts into the game engine. Wouldn't you? Imagine, you're using your flamethrower to heat up a tank of gas to increase the pressure inside so that the tank explodes and the gas suffocates everyone except you, who has a gas mask. BLAM! too slow. Your opponent, who only kept in mind the basics of mechanics and kinematics, just grabbed the nearest rocket launcher and went for the head shot. Now we get to see "rag doll" physics in action. Using s = s0 + v0t + 1/2gt^2, we can tell exactly where your severed head will land. Fun!

Computer Science 287, Programming Language Paradigms -- now hold on, you said you were going for a CS degree. Surely you must care? Negatory, nicht, nein, non, and not as such. The course is taught in a language called Scheme, which is a derivative of another language called LISP. I had previous experience with Scheme when I took a summer course with the Johns Hopkins University's CTY program. I didn't understand then. But then again, I was in eighth grade and knew only a fraction of the knowledge of computer programming I do now. I understand most of that now. And we managed to cover all of that in the first week of class here.

But more importantly, how many programs do you know of that are written in Scheme? Probably none. And you wouldn't be alone in your left-in-the-dark-edness. (New word! Let's get it into Oxford!) I knew of none when I came in to the class, and I can only name ONE major program that uses it now, three weeks or so from the final exam. Audacity, the open-source audio editing tool, supposedly uses a dialect of Scheme to do...something. Yeah, well, the rest of the program is written in C++, as are THE VAST MAJORITY OF ALL OTHER PROGRAMS OUT THERE! And yet, how many courses have I taken in C++? Zero. Not a one. 0x00000000. CS132 I skipped because of AP credit, CS187 was taught in Java, and CS201 was taught in Assembly language for the ARM processor.

Well, if not C++, why not more Java? I like Java. I want to learn to do something fun in Java, like...write my own messaging program, like AIM. Just because I can. But no, apparently it's necessary to the major that we understand what snippets of code rife with "cons" and "lambda" do. Why bother learning about this shit when I calready know how to do this in another language? And not just any language, but an object-oriented, platform-independent one, named after a variety of coffee?

A semester wasted. Gotta get my mind off this. I need sleep.