Yes. He really thought it was efficient and would avoid errors if literally all variables were defined in a single Matlab function he called at the beginning of the script. We students all thought: "Man, are you serious?" As we didn't want to debug such a mess, in our code, we ignored what he was doing and kept using local variables.

[–] Chriszz@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah I misread I thought it was specifically a programming course. I can expect this from a math prof.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, it was a course on finite deformation material models. And no, you do really, really not want to declare each and every variable in your material subroutine globally for the whole finite element program.

[–] magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Lecturers at universities tend to have little to no industry experience at all.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.de 4 points 1 year ago

Productive research is also hard to imagine with such coding practice either.

[–] Techmaster@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

That's why when your job hires new people right out of college they have no idea what they're doing and now must be trained how to actually do the job. "What, you mean we aren't writing this enterprise application in python!?"