> I think this person misunderstood the students, the student wanted a project to practice programming,
I think you misunderstood the students. The person whose was actually present at the time the words were spoken says the students wanted ideas for a “software project”, not some extremely minimalistically defined “programming problem” It’s completely reasonable to assume they wanted to practice real world software development, not just how to implement the most pedantic set of requirements possible.
A software project could be "write a web browser" or "write a bug tracker", those are much better since the interface is then an inherent part of the problem to be solved.
> It’s completely reasonable to assume they wanted to practice real world software development,
I've written real world command line utilities used by other programmers. It takes like an hour, I write the code and document how to use it in a readme, then if they have questions they just ask me. A lot of the time trying to do something complex big design up front kinda thing as suggested in this article is just a waste of time. Fiddling with UX on a project that will only ever get used by a few programmers is a waste of time.
> A lot of the time trying to do something complex big design up front kinda thing as suggested in this article is just a waste of time.
This is one of those things that comes with experience. A junior programmer will make a meal of the simplest task. An experienced developer will, if possible, interpret the problem in a way that makes the implementation trivial while still solving the user's problem. Sometimes this doesn't actually involve writing any code at all.
I think you misunderstood the students. The person whose was actually present at the time the words were spoken says the students wanted ideas for a “software project”, not some extremely minimalistically defined “programming problem” It’s completely reasonable to assume they wanted to practice real world software development, not just how to implement the most pedantic set of requirements possible.