Is this kind of Design by Contract useless?
- by Charlie Pigarelli
I've just started informatics university and I'm attending a programming course about C(++).
The programming professor prefers to teach very few things (in 3 month we have just reached the functions topic) and connect every topic with a type of programming design that somehow is similar to the Design by Contract design.
Basically what he ask us to do is to write every exercise with comments Pre-conditions, Post-conditions and Invariants that should prove the correctness of each program we write.
But this doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, ok: maybe writing down your thoughts prevent you from doing some mistakes, but if this is all an abstract thing, then if your program intuition is wrong you'll write your program wrong and then you'll also write pre and post conditions wrong probably auto convincing your self about its correctness.
Most of the time, both me and other students have written programs that seemed ok and that had correct pre and post condition too. But at the moment of testing it was just completely wrong.
I had some experience before this course of programming and I had written a lot of line of code before and I found myself comfortably with just writing a program and unit test it. It take less time to accomplish and is less "abstract" than just thinking about what every single piece of your program should do in every case (which is kinda like mentally testing it).
Finally, all this pre and post conditions takes me like 80% of the total time of the exercise. It's harder to think about putting down this pre and post correct than to write the program itself.
Since we are like the only course of the only university probably in the entire world that makes this things, could someone please tell me how should I manage this thing? Am I right thinking that this doesn't worth anything? Should I change university? (there are like double of the people attending that course and it seems that usually very few people passes the exam the first year). Should I convince myself it's method is right?
