reminds me of that one lecturer who was teaching us "industry things". Every time he'd say "now this is how you'll do it in the industry", he'd talk about something that is absolutely not done in the industry

what the hell have i just read

it’s actually only about 60% wrong if you realize the person was trying to describe binary executables

i dunno, there's a lot you can nitpick about it but overall it seems pretty reasonable to me and appropriate for a university cs class

This is painful

The slide is bad, but it's quite a stretch to generalize from one slide taken out of context from one course at one university to...all university CS education.

Windows coded education moment

Cursed

I once opened up one of those old physical hard drives up to get the letters of the text files out. The letters are basically like typebars on a typewriter.

at this point I genuinely consider university as anti education

each one of those 3 billion devices running Java right at this moment are so lucky that they can read the magical binary format that Java alone can achieve. Meanwhile all other languages have to communicate via text files because binary is absolutely platform dependant!

When I worked at large company with PC and mainframe divisions, I asked my boss to get me mainframe (COBOL) data files to read on my PC. “You can’t do that,” he sputtered, “that’s BINARY”. To a computer, it’s ALL binary!” I retorted.

at first it seems passible but it gets worse the more you read it.

honest question, how do you introduce this concept to someone who barely has CS knowledge?

This text file identifies as non-binary.

You know I'm a professional Java Developer who has dedicated a lot of time to learning obscure parts of that language. (JavaCards anyone?) I have no idea what a Java binary file is, very glad I dropped out of college.

considering Java bytecode to be a "binary file" is a very interesting choice

UNICODE has entered the chat.

There is nothing wrong with this slide. He is abstracting a concept, this is what academia does.

It's the whole reality with universities - they invent garbage wrappers for reality instead of showing how it is. But what else would you expect from people who never worked an honest day of a job.

I think in this context, “binary files” means “executable files”. When people say “binary file” without qualifiers (e.g., “run the binary”), it typically refers to a compiled executable. In Unix/Linux, this is reinforced by: • The bin/ directory (short for binaries) • Commands like file hello → “ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable…” • Common phrases: “Download the binary”, “Statically linked binary” So the screenshot is correct — it’s using standard systems terminology where “binary” = native executable, contrasting it with Java’s platform-independent

Somebody needs a refund on their tuition.

This is enough to justify using java to stakeholders. He will be employed for the rest of his life

I mean look technically all files are binary files, and different file types are just interpretation hints

It really is the blind leading the blind.

Omg.

It's kinda correct if you're in the '90s and you're serializing structures to a file in C.