Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[scriver]

Today tick season officially begins. I took two of them off me right now.

[Arx]

Today tick season officially begins. I took two of them off me right now.

...at least you can tick things off on your to do list now?

* Arx ducks

[ChairmanPoo]

Today tick season officially begins. I took two of them off me right now.

you know I almost went forest exploring yesterday until my mother reminded me of that

[hector13]

Today tick season officially begins. I took two of them off me right now.

you know I almost went forest exploring yesterday until my mother reminded me of that

It’s only risking a little bit of disease which might last a lifetime, don’t let that put you off.

[Vector]

I hope they can take care of it quick. That sounds nasty to deal with.

[methylatedspirit]

Right now, I can quite confidently say that flowcharts are the worst part of my C++ class. Why, oh why? My brain's compiler doesn't target flowcharts! Who does? I can't produce them at the speed that I can with pseudocode or actual code, so the fact that a question about converting pseudocode to a flowchart is in a time-constrained quiz annoys me to no end.

Also, the quiz wants you to hand write C++ code, and one of the questions needs text table output (without any libraries to handle that). No IDE. No compiler. In what fucking era do they think we're in?! This isn't the 60s or 70s! We're not hand-writing assembly (or worse, machine code) for Donald Knuth's MIX, are we!? What, "to learn the compiler, you must first become the compiler", was that the goal?

And they make you use C-style char arrays, for some godforsaken reason, with all the operations you'd need. I'm supposedly learning C++, why am I regressing back to C? Was string class not easy enough?

Don't get me started on the difference between single and double quotes. Why!? Why in an intro to programming am I really having to consider the difference between these two? God, the low-level minutiae of C++ is really getting to me. AND THE FUCKING QUIZ DOESN'T LET YOU USE AN IDE TO CHECK! You have to be fucking kidding me.

Give me Python any day. At least there isn't a gotcha at every turn. At least it behaves in a way that your first glance is usually the way that the interpreter runs it. I get using C++ for systems programming because those tiny details do matter in that context, but as a language for introducing programming to first-timers, it's terrible. The details make no sense in an introductory context, and it's certainly frustrated the hell out of me. Everything I'm being taught can be done in Python, anyway.

[martinuzz]

Today tick season officially begins. I took two of them off me right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_lz8hvkYVA

[McTraveller]

At least there isn't a gotcha at every turn. At least it behaves in a way that your first glance is usually the way that the interpreter runs it.

Hahaha what?

Ok of course at least Python is not as bad as Javascript in terms of violation of the principle of least astonishment.

C/C++ (and their ilk) do benefit from a particular mental model though - they are basically "mostly portable assembler" and if you think of it that way, it's not that surprising in how it behaves.

As for things like single-vs-double-quotes, C-likes are one of the most consistent languages there. Single quotes are always and only character constants; double quotes are contiguously allocated character constants, automatically terminated with a byte containing 0.  None of the nonsense like Javascript where single and double quotes do different things depending on context.  Context-sensitive behavior is anathema for minimization of systematic error.

Flowcharts though - I'm going to get on my soapbox here. If you don't understand why flowcharts are useful, I'm going to blame your teachers.  Flowcharts, state machine diagrams, and other representations besides pseudocode are extremely important for software engineering.  If you want to get serious about programming, don't fall into the trap of focusing on typing in code in any particular language. Focus on problem definition, understanding what tool (language, toolchain, data model, etc.) is best to solve the problem, etc.

Yes many software bugs result from incorrect code, but the worst software errors come from incorrect (or no) design in the first place.

[methylatedspirit]

C/C++ (and their ilk) do benefit from a particular mental model though - they are basically "mostly portable assembler" and if you think of it that way, it's not that surprising in how it behaves.

Can you point me to somewhere that teaches the 'portable assembler' interpretation of C? My current conception of programming is trained on higher-level languages than C, so I'd really want to know why C-likes behave the way they do. At my level, I simply don't understand why anything works the way it does in C, apart from a just-so story of "this is how programming is, and this is how it will always be". It's not satisfying.

Yes many software bugs result from incorrect code, but the worst software errors come from incorrect (or no) design in the first place.

Even more bugs result when you're arbitrarily disallowed from testing code. Like, the IDE is right in front of me, why are they not letting me use it!? No-one learns by memorizing large sets of arbitrary patterns, at least I hope not in programming. Leave the perfect recall of rules to the compiler.

[Kagus]

No-one learns by memorizing large sets of arbitrary patterns, at least I hope not in programming. Leave the perfect recall of rules to the compiler.

Ever been to India?

[dragdeler]

-

[bloop_bleep]

Flowcharts are useful. Also I think it's important to programmers to actually understand the details of the how the things they're working with work, including pointers, memory allocation, memory management, spacial layout of data, function calls. Frankly C++ is a pretty great language to teach first because of that I think. For example you learn the difference between characters and strings which is quite important -- single quotes just denote an integer constant with a special syntax; double quotes notify the compiler to allocate an area in the executable containing the given data and hand over a reference to that data to the code. Character a and string a are not the same and it is good they have different syntaxes. This may also be why they're having you use char pointers to strings rather than nicely wrapped string objects. It helps teach the fundamentals of how processing is done rather than squirreling it away underneath the covers like Python does. Not that you shouldn't use nicely wrapped string objects. But you should know how they work and how to do it the other way as well.

C/C++ are "high-level" but "close-to-the-metal". Each statement translates pretty directly to a sequence of machine code instructions and the objects you manipulate correspond to objects the machine instructions manipulate. In particular, pointers. The structure and placement corresponds pretty plainly. C more so than C++, because of exceptions, copy assignment operators, things like that. That's one reason I've heard for people preferring C to C++. But they're both pretty close.

C++ can have some annoying context-sensitive behavior though. Take the most vexing parse. There's also ten different ways of initializing a variable. This complexity has increased with recent standards releases.

[methylatedspirit]

I'm most annoyed that I wasn't taught a markup language that lets me produce flowcharts at the speed that I can bang out pseudocode. Word is unbearably slow for flowchart production, especially if you want it to look presentable (Edit: this was before I heard of SmartArt). Plus, general-purpose GUI interfaces are slow; I'd rather use a specialized language to do it. I believe there's Mermaid for that. (There's LaTeX, but I've been putting off learning it.)

C/C++ are "high-level" but "close-to-the-metal". Each statement translates pretty directly to a sequence of machine code instructions and the objects you manipulate correspond to objects the machine instructions manipulate. In particular, pointers. The structure and placement corresponds pretty plainly. C more so than C++, because of exceptions, copy assignment operators, things like that. That's one reason I've heard for people preferring C to C++. But they're both pretty close.

I'd really like to see the interplay between C/C++ code and the generated assembler, because that would be a far more fascinating thing to see than just trusting this opaque black box that I've been taught a compiler is. Is there any program that does that, where it shows on one side the C++ code, and the other the assembler?

[McTraveller]

I'd really like to see the interplay between C/C++ code and the generated assembler, because that would be a far more fascinating thing to see than just trusting this opaque black box that I've been taught a compiler is. Is there any program that does that, where it shows on one side the C++ code, and the other the assembler?

Just about every C/C++ compiler will have a command line option to output assembly, e.g.

Code: [Select]

gcc -g -s mycode.c will output a mycode.s file which is a plain-text assembly listing along with the code inline. The -g option is debug code, which basically guarantees almost literal translation between the C and assembly.  It's instructive to compare the -s output with various optimizations enabled.

For drawings: consider draw.io (app.diagrams.net).  It is a free, fairly complete diagram tool, and it even has "native" apps so you don't have to be online if you don't want to be. It can also export all kinds of useful diagram types (SVG, PNG, HTML, XML).  It has shape templates for most diagram types.

[ArchimedesWojak]

Hey guys what's the protocol if there are a very large group of people outside your neighbors house (sounds like a party of some kind i hear music) shouting sexist and homophobic slurs