Why I love (and hate) my computer science homework

Hohkay, so, this week for my Systems and Networks class I have to create the control logic for a processor they gave us in a circuit simulator program. Now while this is not the easiest assignment in the world, the overall idea is definitely not unreasonable. The problem comes in when the circuit simulation software we use in only used in education and has no users in any kind of industry, so it's buggy as all get out. The "program" we are writing for the processor (it's basically just a list of states in a finite state machine) has to be written in a language created just for this homework assigment so the compiler we have to use is about as robust as a house of cards. It tends to crap out if you don't hit enter the secert magic number of times that it wants you to.

The thing is, while you end up spending more time learning to use the buggy tools instead of working on the real objective of the project, you really end up getting a feel for what working on these kinds of projects is like in the real world. Unless you're doing something really boring that has been done many times before, you are going to spend most of your time troubleshooting the bugs in others peoples code your having to work with, or working around arbitrary constraints. I guess that's any technical professions though.

At any rate, sorry for the big lapse in posts, I've been pretty busy with live latley. I'll start trying to have some less computer sciencey things in the future.