bcc

[mikm]

Learn to use it, you idiots.

[Evil Lu]

Originally posted by mikm
Learn to use it, you idiots.

Too right!
And for people too stupid to understand,
http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/bcc-for-privacy.html

[k_rock923]

Originally posted by mikm
Learn to use it, you idiots.

[mikm]

[CaboWaboAddict]

Shit, all this time I thought bcc stood for Borland C Compiler.

[Razzinno]

I always use bcc and tell others why they should, but none of them bother.

[Sawg]

Learning to use Borland, now that is a waste.

[gaekwad2]

I miss Turbo Pascal.

[k_rock923]

I despise the fact that CS is taught in java here. A good load of my classmates will graduate without having a clue about pointers.

[will]

But that'll make you better than them, right? And thus be more successful.

CS courses are about giving you the tools to teach yourself about languages, not to teach you what you need to know in the workplace.

Because it all changes so fast in CS, there is no other option.

[k_rock923]

I think I'm just bitter because we were implementing quicksort the other day (as you know, there are two recursive calls in most implementations) and everyone kept complaining that they were overflowing the stack. They knew this because java gives a nice stack overflow exception. When I was learning recursion, i got segfaults.

In any event, what bothers me is that I'm left to hone my skills in other languages on my own, instead of getting good courses in them.

[zootm]

Originally posted by will
CS courses are about giving you the tools to teach yourself about languages, not to teach you what you need to know in the workplace.

Never a truer word spoken.

And for the record, I think that Java is a better language to teach than C or C++. Direct memory manipulation isn't something it's important to teach in a coding class, and it's not like it's hard to learn it once you have the basics down.

I guess it's worth noting that when we had the big "What language should be taught at Uni?" debate (ok, argument) at my work, I was a lot more in favour of Python, although the fact that it's dynamically-typed is possibly not so helpful.

Originally posted by k_rock923
In any event, what bothers me is that I'm left to hone my skills in other languages on my own, instead of getting good courses in them.

So? Languages are much of a muchness, really. Learning the fundamentals are what's important, then you can just move between tools (languages) as you please.

[swingdjted]

[ONTOPIC] I have a bcc reminder as an email sig. Each and every email I send has an explanation as to what bcc is and why to use it every time there's more than one recipient. It appears below the email just like "Don't forget to live before you die" appears below each of my winamp posts. (unless you have sig viewing disabled) [/ONTOPIC]

[xzxzzx]

Originally posted by zootm
And for the record, I think that Java is a better language to teach than C or C++. Direct memory manipulation isn't something it's important to teach in a coding class, and it's not like it's hard to learn it once you have the basics down.

I respectfully disagree. I'm not convinced everyone can understand things like pointer manipulation, and if that's true, then most people finishing a class in Java (who will never understand what's going on underneath), are going to become very bad programmers.

[zootm]

Originally posted by xzxzzx
I respectfully disagree. I'm not convinced everyone can understand things like pointer manipulation, and if that's true, then most people finishing a class in Java (who will never understand what's going on underneath), are going to become very bad programmers.

Sorry, not sure what you mean there. Java's OO model is more applicable abstractly to most systems than C/C++ is, and memory manipulation is abstracted out by most sensibly-designed systems.

[mikm]

I laughed at the "ontopic" tags.

[zootm]

Originally posted by mikm
I laughed at the "ontopic" tags.

[ontopic]I don't ever use BCC, because I'm never in the situation where it should be used, and most email I send is either to one person at a time or work-related, where a full "trail" is beneficial.[/ontopic]

[xzxzzx]

Originally posted by zootm
Sorry, not sure what you mean there. Java's OO model is more applicable abstractly to most systems than C/C++ is, and memory manipulation is abstracted out by most sensibly-designed systems.

Hahaha. I just reread what I wrote. To clear up some potencial confusion, I meant "completing a training course", by "finishing a class" (I don't know if you misunderstood).

What I mean is that ultimately, you have to understand what a computer is actually doing if you're going to get any good at programming, particularly if you want your programs to run quickly, because otherwise, when the abstraction leaks (and it always does!), you're going to go off in the wrong direction. The best you'd be able to hope for is that you'd amass enough rules that you wouldn't mess up the majority of the time, but that's not really enough.

[zootm]

But direct memory manipulation isn't a good part of that, is my point. If you're learning about abstract concepts, it's more important to learn data structures, and algorithms, and how they're represented. The actual nitty-gritty of how memory is allocated and the like is rarely important (concepts like the stack and the heap are equally applicable to garbage-collected languages).

[k_rock923]

When people in my class were trying to figure out where the stack overflow exceptions were coming from and why their recursion wasn't working, knowing about how the stack works became very important.

[xzxzzx]

Originally posted by zootm
But direct memory manipulation isn't a good part of that, is my point. If you're learning about abstract concepts, it's more important to learn data structures, and algorithms, and how they're represented. The actual nitty-gritty of how memory is allocated and the like is rarely important (concepts like the stack and the heap are equally applicable to garbage-collected languages).

I don't think you're going to be able to really understand a data structure and not understand direct memory manipulation at the same time—implementing a linked list using pointers basically means you must understand the memory manipulation behind it, and therefore the data structure itself, including its most important characteristics. It's not that you couldn't understand without doing it, but doing it makes you understand it.

It's a practical thing. It's not that you couldn't teach the same concepts in Java, it's that without being very careful, you're going to wind up with many students not really understanding what they're doing. An introductory course in Java? Fine. But I think you're going to just wind up with the same dropouts/incompetents later, rather than earlier, because understanding the pointer manipulation which is going on anyway in Java and actually doing the pointer manipulation in C is too close.

It's too easy to make an intro Java class which "anyone" could get, where the implication is "this is programming", when it's really not (well, it's junior-level programming, perhaps). It's sort of dishonest.

Note that I don't really think it's a bad idea to use Java, per se, or Python, or really anything (real-world languages are better, for obvious reasons). (Actually I kind of like the idea of using Python...) It's just that I think that the kind of professor who could teach effectively with Java would probably not want to use Java.

[zootm]

Originally posted by xzxzzx
It's just that I think that the kind of professor who could teach effectively with Java would probably not want to use Java.

They'd probably want to use something like Haskell or ML, which if anything are more abstract. People hugely overestimate the value of direct memory manipulation in "understanding what the computer is doing". You gain very little - object orientation as it is implemented in Java is essentially just a typesafe version of pointers. What you gain in C with pointers is just a bunch of dangerous abstractions instead of a bunch of checked ones. Manually allocating and deallocating the memory doesn't help a lot in terms of understanding.

There's a lot of people who believe you should start people out on barebones assembler, but I just can't see how that's beneficial. We abstract things into data structures not as syntactic sugar, but because that is how things are genuinely stored on the system. The fact that something has to monitor their presence too is more minor.

[gameplaya15143]

Originally posted by k_rock923
I despise the fact that CS is taught in java here. A good load of my classmates will graduate without having a clue about pointers.

Same in my school.. and it really sucks. I was lucky enough to at least get an overview of pointers before the big switch from c++ to java, but I still hardly understand how to use them properly.

Abstract topics are fine, but completely worthless if you can't actually implement them.


As for the on-topic stuff..
I usually don't use BCC, mainly because I often have group discussions over email and everyone knows everyone else. I certainly understand its purpose though, and can't stand when idiots don't use it when they should.

[zootm]

Originally posted by gameplaya15143
Abstract topics are fine, but completely worthless if you can't actually implement them.

C++ wouldn't help you implement them, though.