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C++


Marsh
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No, that's what you think it said. Allow me to actually enlighten my statement for you, considering you won't be able to interpret it properly. I've said that anyone who claims to know C++, and that is beyond the basics, to the point where that person has a lot of experience with the language, and who also claims that the language is easy, that is, easy to grasp for anyone to that same point as the person claiming it or anything similar, doesn't know the language too well, which means that he actually knows as much as the basics of the programming language. By pointing out that the people in this thread think that if you know the basics of the language, that the language is actually easier to comprehend, you have just confirmed my statement, once again. If you don't see how, or why, then please do stop bothering.

As for the matter on colleges and universities, and please let's make that distinction, they are professional and academic respectively. That means that for the latter, there is no particular interest in teaching students how to programme in a professional fashion. For the prior, on the other hand, there is an interest in teaching students how to programme in a professional fashion, i.e. preparing a student for a job. That doesn't mean that any of the professional students will know how to write well-thought and formal C++ code, because it is complicated to do so, and it is even more complicated to actually teach someone how to do that. Capable academic students on the other hand will do a far better job at it, but are hard to find, especially because most academic students end up in the professional world instead.

Furthermore, there is nobody who will teach you all the ambiguities that are C++, there is nobody who will teach you when you should use what design pattern (except for a few colleges) and there is definitely nobody who will step you through the entire documentation of the Boost library, since these are things you'll learn by experience, something which no teacher will be able to teach you, other than trial and error itself, and even then, you won't be able to write well-thought and formal C++ code, because the language is just an overcomplicated overambiguous mess that makes you cry blood. It's exactly that why C, Java and Python are popular choices amongst colleges and universities, unless they are trying to target a certain niche.

Yours faithfully

S.J.R. van Schaik.
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Oh, I am definitely not against the choice of the programming language, in fact I actually applaud it, since once people actually start using other programming languages as well, they will realise why they should have avoided this particular one, in the first place.

Yours faithfully

S.J.R. van Schaik.
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No Marshy Dearest I am done. Stephans walls of text are time consuming to read and do nothing but make me lose more respect for him. He seems to enjoy making points that either do not pertain to the arguement or attempt to direct his past statements into a new ground in which he can spew out more things that are either highly opinionated or narrowminded.

Yours unfaithfully

Sexy Beast /eyeroll
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It's good to know that the amount of respect you bring up for someone is closely tied to your consideration of how someone is highly opiniationated and narrow-minded. At least, I am not forced to live with people with similar considerations.

Yours faithfully

S.J.R. van Schaik.
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Well considering every computer has NOTEPAD or an equivalent text editor, and there have been freely accessible C++ compilers availible for some time now (on multiple platforms), it is a much easier language in an accessibility sense. With VB6, it was defacto abandonware but it wasn't officially so it wasn't necessarily the easiest language to get into if you wanted to be legitimate, and it required proprietary software to be produced as well.
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As a programmer you want to stay away from plain text editors such as Notepad, or RTF-based text editors such as Wordpad. They don't offer any features to aid you when you are programming. You will definitely want line numbers, horizontal guides (one that is located at 80 columns), proper identation settings (tabs/spaces, automatically align properly when pressing enter) and syntax high-lighting. In addition to that, you will also want a tab-based and/or a tile-based editor. On Linux that means you are fine with editors such as vim, emacs, and Gedit, which are usually shipped with your distribution. On Microsoft Windows, on the other hand, you are likely to be using an IDE, if you are not using a UNIX-environment.

Whilst it is true that C++ compilers have been freely available on various platforms for quite a while now, it is also true that some compilers are better than others depending on what you want to do with them. MinGW and CygWin, for instance, are quite poor at producing proper binaries for Microsoft Windows, and aren't able to easily interface with most of the libraries that are used on Microsoft Windows, because that's not what they where made for. They were made for UNIX enthusiasts who want to run their programmes specifically written for UNIX on Microsoft Windows (the prime example being Git, which includes OpenSSH as well as some other UNIX utilities). That leaves you with the Microsoft Visual C/C++ compiler, if you want to support Microsoft Windows properly, considering that most other compilers are obsolete, or commercial (so is Microsoft Visual C/C++ to some extent).

On platforms such as Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, and just about every UNIX-platform you have the choice between GCC, which is the de facto compiler suite for UNIX, or LLVM. Both being free options, in that case, you'll have an advantange, if you are developing cross-platform software.

Yours faithfully

S.J.R. van Schaik.
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I know C++. Just PM me with questions.

Yes, C is better, but for a beginner programmer it can turn into a nightmare in my experience. Most newbies have no idea what they're doing, so they need to rely on OOP for the organization. C has OOP, but you have to implement it yourself, so it can turn into a pain. For a game, you want the language to be simple and organized. C++ provides that. Once you start programming complicated stuff, it's best to move to C or some other extremely low-level language.
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If you are a newcomer to programming, and don't know what language to choose. You definitely want to start out with a language like Python. For most people it is one of the most simplistic and straight-forward languages, and it will actually guide you through most of the basics you have to know before approaching most other programming languages, considering it enforces you to indent your code, and considering it presents the object-oriented paradigm in a transparent and comprehensible fashion. Despite the language being very easy to learn, it is actually incredibly powerful, once you start using the numerous libraries that are being offered for Python, which is an enormous asset of using Python: you will get rewarding results for your efforts, which is what most people want.

After learning Python, you have quite a few choices. You can move on towards an imperative programming language such as C, or you can actually learn about functional and declarative programming. The latter two are useful as they actually broaden your view, causing you to use idioms common to those paradigms when programming in a different language that doesn't directly support that paradigm. An example of this is the use of function pointers in C, which is a concept originating from functional programming. Interesting languages to learn are Haskell, Lisp (or Clojure), Erlang, Io, Scala and Prolog. Be aware that they are hard to get into, once you are used to different paradigms.

The prior is an easily accessible powerhouse, where having been introduced to Python before, will make it easier for anyone to learn. I personally think that possible the hardest thing to grasp would be pointers.

As for C++, I would personally avoid it. If you want to write good C++ code, you'll either end up writing overengineered code (that has numerous inexplicable bugs crawling in it), or code that looks extremely familiar to C, but that isn't exactly C code, just because you wanted to prevent all those inexplicable bugs, which are mostly caused by obscurities. The other problem is that it is incredibly hard to read someone else's C++ code (I don't blame you, even compilers have this exact issue), which isn't a problem if you are working all by yourself, but it definitely is when working on projects.

If you don't have to write C++ code any time soon, then I recommend you to check out [this website](http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/). Albeit a bit harsh on some points, it definitely is a good summary of all the problems you may encounter in C++. On the other hand, I also recommend you to read it if you are about to write C++ code, in which case you'll know how to write C++ code without a lot of surprises.

Yours faithfully

S.J.R. van Schaik.
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