What are your programming projects like at school? For us we keep making 'apps' that are only usable in a command line. That is not how things are done in the real world (apps open separate windows, there are visible user interfaces, you can actually see what is going on) when software is being developed, so what gives? I have to learn and create important/useful stuff on my own time because entire weeks are dedicated to basic stuff like string tokenizers when that sort of thing can be learned in under an hour. I thought that this would stop right after high school, but I guess not.