Khorde

I am experiencing this issue as well on OS X. I do believe that I saw the effect come back for a short while then stopped appearing again, felt more like a fluke that it was suddenly shown.

#1! Why go against it.

And that is why kids must stay in school and drink their milk!

I think it comes down to that everybody is right in this thread. I think people are kinda discussing different topics regarding programming. You need to know academic stuff. You need to program a lot and often do more than uni makes you do. All courses in Uni are not good. All the thinks you can teach yourself are not going to be right or correct. And yes, professors often get out of touch with industry standard programming. But they sure do know their (pseudo) algorithms like the back of their hands. To reach the industry standard of programming skillz you need to practice and practice - as well as know ****. And going to uni is like doing master level sudokus for five-something years. It's gonna make you sharp if anything. At a lot of thing. General trend is that people after a couple of years get better at the practical art of programming too. get your pseudo on

Just to comment on this, this is purely a case to case situation and I wouldn't be so quick to generalize "university courses" in such a broad sense. Unis aren't perfect and of course I've had classes that were supposed to be fun (like a course in constraint programming) that turned out to be a pile of garbage, but then there are the courses that really taught me a lot of advanced theory as well as providing extremely fun programming challenges and tasks (like a course in cryptography. Which by the way is a field which is quite hard to enter on your own but extremely useful and rewarding.). --- Considering that your cousin seems to be at a young age I agree with the previous post that starting with simpler, more instantly rewarding stuff like Game makers and map editors and what not is a good way to ignite his passion for the glorious arts (huzzah). Hopefully it will spark an interest that will last for ever and save mankind. But to clarify, I do believe that academic education is most often necessary for a solid foundation as a programmer (in any field of programming) as after your years at college/uni are over you will realize that even though a lot of it is theoretical you will (hopefully) somehow have progressed leaps and bounds beyond what you'd imagined. At least in the sense that you can grasp most concepts and problems and evaluate them and approach them. Programming becomes your tool. So simply neglecting academy might prove harmful in the long run. In fact, that is amongst the most important things we try to teach the first year students. We try to get rid of all the biased knowledge they might have gathered on their own. Just as a music teacher tries to make his student unlearn any bad habits he might have picked up during her/his three years of playing the violin self-taught (her/his parents hated the first six months of self practice). You try to break them out of their mould, and instead help them understand the concept of using the right language/tool for the right task. For instance, the people claiming that "this language sucks, this language is the R0cxx!@2!", you try to kick those kind of notions out of them and make them realize, when you eat soup you use a spoon and when you eat steak you use a knife. And a fork. Probably. That is the trick. But it goes without saying that you can't learn the violin simply by understanding the sheet music and theory behind the compositions, so you have to practice and practice. And in those cases many of the links posted above and suggestions of modding, developing hacking and stuff are great ways of learning. It is simply a matter of acquiring necessary practical experience as well as necessary theoretical knowledge. They go hand in hand. Now that I have brought both a food and music analogy to the table I am done.

I do not agree with people saying that you don't learn programming from school. To some extent that is true that you can learn the language on your own, but your skills are definitely honed in school. Since there are a lot of ideas of computational efficiency and mathematical theory behind game development I would not be so quick to reject academic pursuits for developing your programming skills. Most of the people I've met that have been the really good programmers/problem solvers have all come from a good academic background and have a firm understanding of advanced topics in math, computer science and physics. Of course there are the odd ones out, but in general most people benefit from higher levels of education since it provides more than learning programming "facts" syntax and such, it develops their thinking and ability to solve problems as well as realize their ideas. You truly learn to master the art of programming. Rather than just becoming a C++-virtuoso, low level hackmaster or ray tracing graphics wiz. But of course, all paths increase your understanding of the logics that go behind development. But yeah. I would say it is a good way.