The way I learned C is as follows. I was a big MUD player in the late nineties, and eventually I downloaded the codebase for the MUD family I liked, and started playing with it. At first, when I wanted a feature, I would simply search through the (large) existing codebase and find something similar, and modify it as needed. As time went on, I become more and more independent until eventually my skill reached that of the original coders…

This is a lot of the motivation behind the Google Summer of Code projects: to get college students’ hands dirty with actual production code. Perhaps institutionalizing it as a carry-over class through your academic career — one “course” of just contributing to a production open source project per year — would help a lot.

As the instructor for CS 1301-Introduction to Computing (with Python & Robots) I disagree. 1301 is designed specifically to teach you the basics of imperative programming (variables, assignment, expressions, function calls / parameters / return values, conditionals, iteration / looping / recursion, etc…) We happen to use the context of Robots (in 1301) or Media (in 1315) to give students something interesting to do with their programs, but the focus is very much on programming fundamentals. Now, in 1301, students are not yet ready to view samples of full sized applications, but I do attempt to demonstrate several large pieces of code in class lectures that try to illustrate how to solve problems correctly and take into account error conditions, bad input, etc.

The Facebook registration is replacing our old login system, and we needed a way to link accounts from the old system to the new Facebook accounts. This seems like a perfect application for using the custom fields part of the FB registration plugin. But since an email address wasn’t necessary on the old system, all we have to confirm the same identity between the Facebook account and previous account is the username/password credentials.

We didn’t feel comfortable bouncing our users’ credentials through Facebook like that, so ended up using the instead and redirecting the user to a “What’s your old username/password?” form. I see now about the no_submit attribute, but must have missed it a month ago. Maybe it would be the best way to go now!

Thanks for the great work you guys are doing at Facebook! We’ll soon be relaunching http://www.onlyattech.net with all sorts of Facebook integration.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/registration/