Memory just came up from reading another rant about static keyword I wanted to share. Involved a network programming assignment in Java back in my heyday.

Fellow student was told that a static member was shared between every object in a class and decided that they could use that to implement network communication (i.e. if they ran the same java program on different machines, they'd be able to communicate by reading to and writing from the same static fields).

Have a memory of sitting in corner of lab overhearing tutor lose their mind trying to (unsuccessfully) explain why this didn't work.

One of my old classes near the end of the degree. The assignment was to create an API that uses other free public APIs eg get a book title, is it a movie on imdb:

Lecturer: "do you need any help?"
Some guy: "I don't know"
Lecturer: " have you done any programming before?"
Some guy: "No"
Lecturer: "Ok. The API should be in js, have a read about it and I'll come back in a couple hours to help you get started"
Some guy: "ok"

1 hour later

Lecturer: "have you had a look?"
Some guy: "yeah I didn't understand anything though"

*Shows wiki page on Java"*

Lecturer: "that's not the right language"
Some guy: "why did you tell me to look at it then?"
Lecturer: ".... Will you be able to do this assignment"
Some guy: "no :("
Lecturer: "as a third year computer science student have you ever written any code?"
Some guy: "no :/"
Lecturer: "do you want to?"
Some guy: "no"
Lecturer: "why did you choose CS if you don't want to write code?"
Some guy: "I want to build robots"

*Lecturer dies inside*

I think it's a creative way to misunderstand how things work. Maybe one day there's a system that works that way. That would be kinda cool.

@Crost how did the student ever manage to pass previous courses? Sounds like a failure that's fully on both the school and the student. Did they ever get their degree?

@electrineer no idea

@Crost I have not checked, but maybe they built a no-code robot or something.

@electrineer I had a kid complain in my intro to c++ class because he thought he was gonna “learn to hack”