Charlie Attends Collage Level Courses in C++

[Charlie]

Long time no see.

Got married, had a kid.

Any career advice? Going back to school, and I know a bunch of C++ programmers who frequent this sandbox.

-Charlie

[hollyfant]

Someone who can script?

Grab him!

[maxcell]

Someone who can script?

Grab him!

indeed!

[Ronan]

Why C++? Want to code games?

[Zelknolf]

I saw this topic's title and assumed it was spam. Was gettin ready to lock it and share a lol with Hialmar.


Also, a collage is a collection of images used to create some artistic piece. A college is a school.

[hollyfant]

Programming is mostly cut & paste anyway, so collage is an apt description.

[Ronan]

Bad programming is mostly cut & paste anyway, so collage is an apt description.

Fixed.

[Charlie]

No, not spam. I've seen a few people here I used to know back in the day when ALFA was in it's infancy. Hoping for some good advice on C++ classes.

-Charlie

Infallibly, yes that pesky spelling error of mine keeps on cropping up... college not collage.

[FoamBats4All]

Plenty of friendly developers here! Some of us are rather keen on C++, and would probably be happy to help.

Also...



Hiiiiiiiii, Chaaaaarliiiieeee.

[Zelknolf]

Real developers learn by reading the programming language specs!


And then they go into the candy mountain cave, with all its magical wonders to behold.

[Ronan]

C++ is not often used for greenfield projects out side of games, some desktop apps, and maybe a few other niches? It gives developers many tools which they can shoot, and in some cases blow off, their feet, compared to a language like C (and so obviously much more so than garbage-collected languages like Java or C#). C is actually more commonly used than C++, despite C++ basically being C with more features.

Edit: Actually its used more often than I thought, considering how reviled it is.

I don't know if they teach the famously-hellish template meta-programming of C++ in your classes or not, but if so my advice would be to avoid them like the plague. While its a pretty crappy language by modern standards, Java is really easy and generally an alternativ to C/C++ for entry-level CS courses.

[Charlie]

Psudo code? Malik's book is what we're going over. This is my first semester on getting to know C++ through a teacher who hasn't updated his course material in three years. Right now I'm up to chapter 8, Arrays and Strings. We're learning how to solve problems, how to read and manipulate strings, and have gone already over simple data types, functions, and a couple other doo dads I can't remember off hand. The core computer-science classes, I believe, will be addressed at a later date. Only trying to get my associates at the moment.

Why oh why do some people still try to teach Visual Basic; the one before .NET? That's about as useful as FORTRAN or Pascal. I'm supposed to learn a second lanugage in addition to c++ for my AA... wondering what would be useful and broaden my employability as a programmer. JAVA does still seem in demand, but I dunno....

[FoamBats4All]

Java's a pretty weak language if you ask me, but it's very useful. Worth learning on the side, and if it's on your way to a degree, all the better.

While Visual Basic/Fortran/Pascal you won't find -too much- in use much today, many things that are old are still worth learning. Say, Assembly language. That has by far been my most rewarding language to learn. Once you learn the deep stuff, all doors open.

Also, ignore Ronan. Templates are a fantastic tool. So is C++. Languages aren't what's important, learning to document, structure, and design is what's important, and C++ has a very logical structure to it, being low-level as it is.

[Ronan]

Also, ignore Ronan. Templates are a fantastic tool.

They're a powerful tool, sure. So is unrestricted pointer manipulation. Production C++ is notorious for insane complexity and being very difficult to maintain. I've never written production C++ code though; just C.

Of course if you learn C++ you'll also know C, which is more of a must.

Learning assembly amounts to learning how a particular bit of hardware. Useful for getting an understanding of how the hardware works, but not as a marketable skill. If you want to work on embedded systems, you'll probably need to be familiar with applying an assembly language, but actually learning one is less important.

My school taught MIPS from a processor we created. It was a fun exercise, but not directly useful. I've had to use assembly in microcontroller work, but no where else that I can recall (and that code was obviously specific to the controller used).

Why oh why do some people still try to teach Visual Basic; the one before .NET? That's about as useful as FORTRAN or Pascal. I'm supposed to learn a second lanugage in addition to c++ for my AA... wondering what would be useful and broaden my employability as a programmer. JAVA does still seem in demand, but I dunno....

What sort of coding do you want to do? Thats the biggest factor.

Java is old and antiquated, but ubiquitous. Most of how you use the language is very simple (and thus typically easy in classes), but C# is better in every way. The CLR is also significantly more advanced than the JVM is on the desktop, though probably not as performant. From an employment standpoint you're probably better off learning the JVM, as its more widely used (in both the enterprise and mobile devices, such as Android phones) and naturally cross-platform.

Keep in mind that to be productive with a language, you also need to learn its ecosystem. For Java thats Maven, an IDE (Eclipse, Netbeans, or IntelliJ), JDBC (Hibernate), servlet containers, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.

If I wanted to prepare myself for where the industry is headed, though knowing the skills may not be immediately useful, I'd learn a functional language. Partially as a result of the increasing number of processor cores, functional languages like Haskell are quickly gaining in popularity. Specifically I don't know of any reasons to use Java or C# over Scala or F#, other than "FP is hard and all our developers only know Java".

I actually find it kind of depressing that Java is still taught in schools.

[Hialmar]

The problem is the difference between a language that's good to learn and a language that is good for a specific business.

Java is a good language for learning because it's quite simple and still has a lot of concepts that you can re-use later on.

C++ is too complex for learning but can be more useful for specific businesses.

To sum up, I'd give the same advice as Ronan, learn a functional language.

Therefore you'll know one imperative language (C++) and a functional one.

In my University, currently, they teach Caml and Ada as introductory languages.

Personally I teach network programming in Java and C++.