Sub Ubi

Inspired partially by Matt Lavine’s quest to find haiku in the words of Bush, Rumsfeld, and other hawkish luminaries of our time, I decided the errors in a program I’m writing should be in the haiku form as well.

The program is intended to make it easy for students to send questions to the instructor while working in the BlueJ programming environment. BlueJ is an piece of software designed to support beginners who are learning to program in the Java programming language.

The interface isn’t all that fancy; it’s just a window that lets them to enter a subject and add some additional text:

Nothing special. When they forget to indicate what course the question is intended for, we get the first possible error they could commit:

Now, they may also leave the “Attach Code” box checked, but not actually have any files in their project. This is unlikely, but possible.

And, of course, they may leave one or both of the fields blank; this isn’t to be tolerated. Actually, it just seems like a bad idea, and makes things harder for the instructor later.

It’s a beautiful day here in Canterbury. Too bad I have work to do. At least an officemate got a giggle out of them.