Request: C++ Help

[Kallian]

Originally Posted by Zippygoose

Edit: To Kallian-yeah, certainly not hard in C++ but still valuable to actually step through each peice and see what's happening. Especially for me as someone who learns best by doing.

I love the VS.NET 2k3 debugger.

For beginner classes, using stdout as a debugger works well too.

printf("beginning block \"A\"\n");

... [group of instructions, or 1 instruction, depending on complexity] ...

printf("made it through block \"A\", continuing...\n");

Like that, except a lot more printfs, couts, printlns, echos, whatever.

[Benito Fireslinger]

System.out.println IS YOUR FRIEND!!!!!

[Big W Powah!]

Originally Posted by Kallian

I love the VS.NET 2k3 debugger.

For beginner classes, using stdout as a debugger works well too.

printf("beginning block \"A\"\n");

... [group of instructions, or 1 instruction, depending on complexity] ...

printf("made it through block \"A\", continuing...\n");

Like that, except a lot more printfs, couts, printlns, echos, whatever.

Yeah, VB.NET is a fucking godsend to anyone programming.

Write all your shit yourself, fuck it, but do it in .NET (although, I enjoy the tools .NET gives ya, the ability to edit the visual side of it through methods other than 30000000 lines of fucking code)

[Kallian]

VB.NET is awesome, hell, all .NET languages are awesome, except J#. People will come down on you for liking Visual Basic.NET, but what they don't realize is the BASIC part in that doesn't stand for Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code anymore. They don't even realize that VB.NET is a fully object oriented language either, unlike VB6.

The right tool for the job, fuck language haters and the *nix nazi's.

/rant

[Malakie Torsade]

Anyone still use Delphi? I really liked it, but never really got to do it much as my job always had me doing VB6/Access/Powerbuilder.

Is VB.net really that good? I've not programmed anything in the past, oh, 10 years or so and would like to get back into it as a hobby.

[Kallian]

Originally Posted by Malakie Torsade

Anyone still use Delphi? I really liked it, but never really got to do it much as my job always had me doing VB6/Access/Powerbuilder.

Is VB.net really that good? I've not programmed anything in the past, oh, 10 years or so and would like to get back into it as a hobby.

It's good & fun. It allows you to create functional applications quickly with simple user interface creation/implementation. If I were you, I'd get a VB.NET book targeted towards beginners, since its been 10 years.

If you get Visual Studio as a whole, you can move to C# after a while, or, start with it, instead of VB.NET.

All in all, either one would be a good choice for a hobby.

[simeon]

I'm currently an undergrad at Illinois State. The good part about this is that the CS department is ridiculously small and the Profs that do a majority of the teaching are both PHD in CS, and carry masters in English and so on, therefore they can actually teach and teach well.

They are all about implementation - I should show you guys some of our programming assignments which promise to bathe you down to a cindering death if you use things such as templated functions, or library sort methods... They actually force you to do, you know, actual CS stuff. On the other hand, fluency in a lot of languages isn't our focal point. They started by teaching us OOP, then from there, all theory. If you know Java or C++, and know it well, it's all you need. The other languages are skittled amongst the rest of the course load through electives, but still, if you know one you know them all (OOP).

Actually, a few weeks ago I was in the IBM sponsored ACM Programming Competition. My team and I placed 8th out of like 150 teams in the region (~80 colleges?). We didn't do so bad for our first run at it - hopefully we win next year. Bottom line, the CS students now aren't absolutely dogshit, but I may be bias. At least in some places they teach programming the way it should be taught.

I think quite possibly the gripe is more towards the students who wish to venture down the Computer Science path and realize it's not all bells and whistles. For instance, I ask people that are in my major what they expect to do with a CS degree, and the response for roughly 90% of them is 'create a videogame.' Go figure.

If I were to guess, this statistic is probably fairly accurate for most undergrad (hopefully not grad) students who are in CS. Possibly these days, due to the increasing popularity, marketing, and acceptability of video games, the wrong kids get the wrong idea about CS and why they want to get into it as a career path. Hell, to be honest, I had an aspiration to do that myself. When people told me that CS was a lot of programming 'theory,' that didn't mean squat to me, because hell, I might be able to make videogames!

Alas, now I churn down time complexity differences between hash tables, AVL/binary search trees, and all the sorts you can throw a wig at. I, personally, accept the fact that I'm most likely going to be working at a corporation aside from my original hope of working for a video game company, and I'm not all too upset.

I would like some input from others on this one. Does anybody who has had / is in a CS degree right now see those same results among the general populous of your fellow students? Or is it the fact that I go to a state university that isn't known for it's CS department, and the students that select it aren't usually the 'best'?

[Kallian]

Benito and I experienced the same thing at our school. Most of them want to start writing video games right away, but are sorely disappointed when they can only write text to the "little black window thingy". Most of them, if they graduate, won't get programming jobs because they don't like it and they just can't sit down and write a simple program.

Congrats on you placing at the ACM competition. We had a good team at the Southeastern regional last year, finished 3 problems with another 3 completed but failing on edge cases that we couldn't detect for some reason. Completing 6 problems would have been very nice (it would have been a top 5 or 6 placing, I don't remember), but it was not meant to be.

As far as language fluency, you're right, it's not about that. If a good programmer (someone with talent) learns one language, they should be able to pick up any other language efficiently.

[Zippygoose]

100% agree. My education was almost identical to yours-small department, all lecture was done by the professors themselves.

The only problem I ran into when I got my first real job is that I knew C++ and C# quite well, but I didn't know about many of the built-in libraries and classes since we had to write all of them out by hand in school. So I'd actually write out some methods that were already built-in and get some weird looks from fellow devs.

It looked something like-"dude, you know instead of that method you wrote you can just write string[] x = y.Split(','); right?"

This kind of stuff just goes with the educational to professional shift though.

Edit: Also, intellisense FTW!

[Murr]

Funny to see other ACM participants on here. I was in the mid-atlantic regional this year and we got 3 - really should have had 4 or 5 but we got stuck with some bugs checking intersections on that one where you had to divide windows/linux users in an office building. Another team from our school (UNC chapel hill) got 3rd in the region, second at site, so hopefully they're going to Japan.

couple things:
Programs vary pretty widely. UNC is supposedly a liberal arts school but our CS program is a lot more focused on theory, etc. than the State schools around here - they basically get taught how to 'program' and shipped out, from what I can tell. That said, it's not perfect. Whoever said something about not knowing a debugger made me laugh as we were NEVER taught to use debuggers, ever - there's such a focus on "writing good code" from the start that it's almost like they don't want to teach you useful debugging tools. I just sort of stumbled on the VS2k3 debugger writing a ray tracer for my graphics class and it's been insanely helpful.

And for simeon -
Coming from someone who "got lucky," I guess, and got into a game coding job, it's really not all it's cracked up to be. I got pretty lucky too with an internship at a pretty small place without too much pressure and no obscene crunch times, etc. But honestly, coding games isn't really noticeably different than coding for IBM or Sun or who the fuck ever unless you're working for a small enough company that you're responsible for some design AND implementation. To some extent I can tell you you'd probably be much happier finding a rewarding, well-paying programming gig elsewhere and just enjoying games in your spare time. The difference in job experience - especially if you work at a big game house like Blizzard or EA or something alone those lines - isn't likely to be very noticeable.
It's honestly a scenario like this:
1) Get "lucky" and get a job in games. Do a lot of coding, realize game code looks a whole lot like any other code you've ever written. Have to work long hours, sometimes ridiculous hours during crunch time (don't be surprised if you work 80-100+ hr weeks during crunch, good luck getting overtime!).
2) Find a rewarding, well paying job coding outside games. Java developers around here start at 50-60k/yr. Medical software is paying insanely for .NET developers. Find some place you can use a newer language you like, like Python or PHP or C# or something (welcome to a life of low-level C++ in games coding unless you work with Unreal, and you'll still end up there. I like C++ in general, but it can wear on you when there's such a premium on speedy code). Less stress, better pay, better hours.

Didn't mean to rant against the game industry. It can be a pretty rewarding experience - like I said, I got pretty lucky and ended up in a low-stress environment where I can do a little bit of everything. But that's pretty rare even past the hurdle of finding a job in the industry at all, and I'm still seriously considering just giving up on the industry as a coder.

[Vinen]

Yeah, I have to agree with previous posters about the current state of the CS Degree. It's amusing the amount of Students who think they will graduate into a job game programming... Most of the people who had this view my freshman year of college failed out rather quickly.

I think one kid out of my class of 11 graduated and got a job Game Programming.

[tikkus]

CS dept at UK is pretty big, my last lecture class (CS-115 - Intro To Comp Programming) had two sections, 100-150 students each. We had a lab once a week where a TA would give us assignments and help us with our individual questions. I had a small programming background (not due to my high school, those backwoods fucks) and it was pretty difficult coursework for me.

That being said, out of my lab class of about 20, 4 people stopped coming, 2 people dropped the class completely, one person that I know of changed his major, and the rest were engineering students just taking the class for the credit. I ended the class with an 89.42 and yesterday discovered that I was the highest grade, haha.

I'm pretty sure its like that everywhere. The people that are like though get weeded out pretty early on.

I never, EVER, had ambitions to be a game programmer. I always loved web development and my prior programming experience had been with PHP. Hopefully, that will be the kind of job I land.

[Darus Grey]

I had so much trouble with my first programming classes about 8 years ago, teacher I had was absolutely horrible.

Could barely speak english, and he'd give written programming tests(wtf?) that were entirely in engrish.

Even through alot of courses and work I still struggled with programming in general until I started taking up linguistics and foreign languages, having to learn so many ways to re-order my thoughts to speak or read finally put me in the right frame of mind to "get it".

I think one kid out of my class of 11 graduated and got a job Game Programming.

Most people don't realize that getting the jobs actually the easy part these days (as soul numbing a job as it is... /sigh).