Phaysis

In school, the prof teaching my “Intro to the C Language” course, Dr. H, really took the “Baptist” part of OBU to heart. The final project was that he would hand us a text file, a book from the New Testament, and we were to write a C program to generate a concordance (an index) to list the chapter and verse of every useful word. Bonus points if we could “stem” the words to collect variants together.

Mine was the book of Ephesians.

I was so behind in C, so out of step with the syllabus, and so overwhelmed and understudied, that I couldn’t even grok how to go about doing it. Obviously, the task is trivially easy now with modern languages. I could hack up something fairly quickly in Python. But the class was C. Low level stuff.

It was one of the lowest points in my academic path.

What really got to me was something about this prof. He was patient, approachable, almost father-knows-best-ish, but boy howdy did he push the scripture. This is the same doc who’d give us 10 bonus points on our tests if we quoted the scripture reference of the week verbatim. He did this to every class he taught. I flatly refused.

The fact that the final was related to the bible stuck in my craw. So obviously I failed that project. I failed that class with an Incomplete. I am not proud.

So why did I go to a baptist university and yet have so much disdain for the bible? Inertia. I started as this bright-eyed freshman on fire for Jesus, but by the time I took this class years later, I had grown a bit and left the church. Yet I still needed to continue with school. Rather than transfer and lose credits, I remained. My hardest lessons were learned outside of class.

I credit my ability to come as far as I have in tech to those who pained to help me when I stumbled, balked, and turned in half-efforts. I eventually got it. But damn it was a rough start.

I still have that text file somewhere. I wonder if I’ll ever finish it, just out of spite.