

Ken Perlin's home page - dkarapetyan
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/

======
idan
I took Ken Perlin's undergraduate graphics course in 2002 or 2003. Back then,
Java was the only way to execute code in a browser that did something useful
in a reasonable amount of time.

More than anything, it enabled a pretty unique pedagogical experience. Every
week we'd have to make something which related to that week's topic
(diffuse/specular shading, geometry manipulation, inverse kinematics,
z-buffers, etc). There were no other content restrictions.

To "submit" our assignment, we'd have to publish the java applet on our
personal page. Ken would go student by student and open up the week's projects
on the projector, then play around with it a little. If you pulled off
something cool, you'd talk about how you did it. If you didn't master the
thing (happened to everyone at least once), you'd talk about what was broken,
and other people would chime in to help you figure out what was wrong. It was
fun either way — detective work without looking at the source.

Most importantly, the whole atmosphere was super-collegial. I learned a ton
and it felt like the right way to teach computer science — build things,
critique, rinse and repeat. I didn't get much sleep that semester ("WHY THE
HELL WON'T THIS RENDER!!!111!!!one" was a common refrain in chat with my
coursemates) but it was the best class I ever took.

Plus, Ken drives vim like a fucking boss. Like, he'd enter some arcane vim
incantation ":ad8723bsd9asasfd" and _bam_ , a ray tracer appeared in his
buffer.

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melling
Turning his courses into a MOOC would be useful.

[http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/courses/fall2013/oct30/](http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/courses/fall2013/oct30/)

[http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/courses/fall2014/](http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/courses/fall2014/)

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kyberias
So many java applets. The dark corners of modern web. I'm never ever going to
run one of those again in my browser.

~~~
jokoon
Oddly my java installation refuse to run those applets for some security
reason, it has been like this for any other applets for a long time now. I
don't think I even want to try to fix it. java is sad.

what's more depressing is that I'm in an internship in some pharma research
company, and we're using java. I really need the job experience and the
degree, but it's weird how sad I feel to sit in front of java code. Coding is
not fun anymore, and it makes me so unproductive. I need to hug a C
programmer.

~~~
logn
Java is alive and well, but Java Applets are dead. And enterprise Java is
depressing.

Some projects that make Java more fun/relevant:

[https://playframework.com/](https://playframework.com/)

[https://jersey.java.net/](https://jersey.java.net/)

