CS Students Frustrated That Computer Does Exactly What They Programmed It To Do

After their first midterm this week, many CS10 students lamented their lack of success. Namely, they’re frustrated that the computer does exactly what it’s programmed to do.

“I know what I want it to do,” said ’24 Victor Chen, still staring at an error message, “so why won’t it do what I want it to do?”

Indeed, students in the class can’t understand how the computer, whose sole purpose for existence is to run through the code line by line and execute it exactly as written, wasn’t functioning the way the student had imagined it in their mind.

“It must be the computer’s fault,” said Chen, even though it wasn’t.

At press time, Chen realized he had forgotten to add a semicolon to the end of a line.

 

—NS ’23