I'm visiting Oxford in May and I'm going to look around Imperial College London and Cambridge in June.

Oxford has just doubled their Comp Sci intake and have said they have had a massive dip in applicants but my school has a much better record with Cambridge. Last year 13 people applied to each, 2 got in to Oxford and 7 got in to Cambridge (with several more in the pool (so if they had put in an open application they would have probably got in to).
Having said that, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that mainly weaker students in our school apply to Oxford, hearing that they are more concerned with passion for the subject, not just Academic performance like Cambridge, so think they have a better chance of getting in to Oxford, when really this isn't as true as they think.

In short, I have no idea what to do. I wish you could still apply to both....

Good luck with the applications.

I didn't know that you only could apply to one? Then again I dont have anything to do with the admin side.

If your going to learn and programming language it might be worth seeing if you can find out what the language is that the university uses, just for a heads up.

I looked into python and didnt really try it that much, I spent time learning MEL.

XNA's pretty easy and simple to get to grips with though it can be processor heavy, C# I like, its good for getting things up and running fast.

I keep trying CUDA occasionally but it has this bug of making my laptop screen black and white! But its amazing, then again I can run it in Matlab for any heavy processing, but matlab compared to C is slow.

Think that I might try to ge a virtual window up and running using object tracking on a webcam in simulink this summer.

Have fun with the coding!

depending on who you talk to you'll get slapped around for calling it a programming language
it's a scripting language isn't it?
everyone i know hates it :p

as long as you dont come here for a compsci degree :p
the courses here just keep getting less and less as time goes on...
when i started they had a games paper in the honours year, by the time i reached honours it was gone... along with half the third year papers *sigh*

Eh, what's the difference really... it's interpreted instead of compiled? *smack* *slap*.....:confused: It's not like we're calling HTML or LaTeX a programming language ;)

Wha...? Who hates python? And why? What has it done to them?

I heard this kind of argument when I was looking at PHP, some 'proper' programmers would think it was not a 'real' programming language. I still have trouble with CSS. It's a 'PROPER' programming language to me!!

I think the distinction comes down to what you can do with it...
CSS, HTML, LaTeX and others are bonafide languages to be sure, but you can't create programs with them (to my knowledge), hence not "programming" languages. PHP, python and others are a bit more in the middle, since you definitely can execute algorithms using them.

Don't really want to start an argument on this though, as everyone has their own definition of what is what.

not trying to start a war myself.. mainly because i dont even know/care about the difference since i read somewhere it depends on who you talk to

although, i just thought scripts are interpreted at run time and languages are compiled and that's it :p

oh and scripting languages are slower

ok, not everyone, but the poeple i've said 'lets do it in python' to they always say "NO"
and end it there....
so i'm not sure why they dont like it
probably the whole indentation-is-part-of-the-code thing mixed with other stuff like... being slow because it's so high level...

i dunno...

sorry for the hijack elephantinc!

Man, I LOVE that! Cross that with a good text editor and no more nesting headaches! Missing a }??? Never. :p

well if you indent your code properly in non-python code you wouldnt have that problem seeing when you're missing brackets or semicolons to begin with ;)



but.. now that you mention text editors, what editors do you guys use..?

Yeah yeah yeah... whatever. I use kate (on kubuntu linux cause that's what it comes with, but I like it).

Me too :)

Thanks for all the support :beer:

I definitely think you could think of it as a programming language.

You used to be allowed to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge but they had so many applicants they had to restrict it a bit
At one point they decided they were going to ask for a language GCSE (no matter what the course) to slim the numbers down further but that never happened, but I still had to take a language because then they told us we needed to. I'm terrible at natural languages (well I wasn't bad at German but my mum strongly dissuaded me from taking it and the French department at my school isn't great.), I took Latin and it was my lowest grade. So that annoyed me </rant>