bl00dninja

jesus...

i always talk about learning c first, but what i failed to mention was that i was also learning c++ concurrently with c. basically i was learning c++ and then referencing c to get a little more detail on some operations. bottom line, when you go to college or the workplace you may be forced into learning a new way to do things, language-wise or other. learn c++ first, but at least look into "c-style strings" and what's really going on when you declare an array. a good c++ book may cover this, but it's common c knowledge.

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i put on my robe and wizard hat...

Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?...Morons.

Senger

I would agree. Actually, that first course in procedural C++ was basically C with the iostream and fstream libraries. We learned character arrays, and were not even "supposed" to know about the C++ string library. And in the second course, we began creating classes, but had to build our own lists, stacks, queues, etc. rather than rely on what the STL had to offer. I think this approach was good: learning the nuts and bolts before relying on too many tools that abstract away all this stuff.

It means that today, I can leave all the grunt work to APIs, libraries, tools, but at least have an understanding of what's going on "under the hood," and be able to rely on my own resources when necessary. I transferred from college into university; the university students who'd been using Java from day 1 were utterly lost when they got into third-year programming courses.

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It can be proved that you can watch streaming video on a Turing machine. The question is, why would you want to?

DaWei

Precisely.

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Abstraction doesn't make it impossible to write bad code; it makes it possible to write superior code.
Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers

MBirchmeier

Huge personal problem with python... is the forced indentation for me.

Being a consultant I spend a lot of time on a lot of different computers, with different OS's and text editors. One day I might open a file in emacs, the next in Visual Studio or notepad.

The biggest problem with this the formatting of lines in a more advanced editor (VS) tabs can be insertted automatically or (EMACS) be replaced with spaces. Although this would usually be a minor cosmetic issue, when it comes a compiler issue, making a quick change, then submitting to source control can become a larger hassle than it should be.

-MBirchmeier

Senger

In terms of inconsitency in spacing, representation, etc., tabs have to be one of the biggest headaches in working with different text editors. Such a trivial thing (except in Python...), and yet such an annoyance.

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It can be proved that you can watch streaming video on a Turing machine. The question is, why would you want to?

Arevos

Honestly, I think this is more of a theoretical problem than a practical one. If we assume that all good programmers indent blocks consistantly, then the only problem that remains is mixing tabs and spaces. Any decent editor will give you the option of coverting tabs to spaces, which would be sufficient to solve your problem.

And even if you forget, the moment the Python interpreter compiles your code into bytecode, it'll flag up an indentation error. A 10 second search and replace and the problem is corrected. Mixing tabs and spaces in the same block is sufficiently rare (and not good practice anyway), and sufficiently easy to fix, that it becomes a none issue.

Or, to look at it another way, how often do you miss out a semicolon on a line? I can count the number of times I've messed up the indentation in Python on one hand. The number of times I've forgotten a semicolon, or missed off an ending bracket, must number in the hundreds by now

teencoder

Hey I don't think going under the abstraction layer is necessary to understand how it works. I use the string library and I love it. I can tell you what a C style string is without ever makeing one myself. A C style string is a null terminated array of characters. Why bother you are more likely to make a mistake like straying off the array.

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Geeks may not be cool now but in the long run they prosper.

DaWei

Is your post recommending C++ before C, or avoiding arrays, or staying out from under the hood, or exactly what????

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Abstraction doesn't make it impossible to write bad code; it makes it possible to write superior code.
Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers

bl00dninja

actually, yeah, by definition it is. you "don't know what the hell is going on" unless you "know what the hell is going on". if you understand how it works, then you have gone under the layer of abstraction. otherwise, you wouldn't know. i believe this is probably an issue in the semantics of the english language. sounds like you're interpreting the statement to mean something it doesn't. any further responses trying to defend your "point" will just make things worse. i'm not disagreeing with your idea, you just don't know how to phrase it properly.

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i put on my robe and wizard hat...

Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?...Morons.

BadBit

I started with c++, people learn in diffrent ways, so diffrent books are beter for some people than others. Rather than change your programming languge (This is a good choice). As to the comment about c++ not being very good for specific things like database's theer are extentions to the common libary. I personally find c++ good because it's so versatile. I do alot of socket/ network programming and i wouldent use any other than c/c++ and CORBA to do this. C is also the most comman languge so you will find alot of support.

As i said trie diffrent learning resource rather than change programming language.

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The GNU documentation says that this bit is set when the stream is "unusable". Presumably the intent is that once this bit becomes set, all bets are off on that stream forever.