Re: How do you actually DO anything?
grhooked@gmail.com writes:
And yet it seems like I cannot do anything with my knowledge.
For example, you can write a program calculating the return
of an investment after 10 years assuming a certain interest
rate.
The ?problem? is that today we have spreadsheet software that
is easier to use for this purpose. But some decades ago, there
where programming languages, but no spreadsheet software yet.
Back then it was perceived as a great achievement to be able
to calculate something like this. You can still calculate it
using C++ today, but today there already is special-purpose
software for this.
To create software with C++ that does something new, something
that can not be done with a database, spreadsheet or another
existing application, you usually will have to learn more C++
and also more about additional libraries, like GUI libraries.
C++ is not completely useless as most desktop software should
be written in C or C++. For example, I assume that Windows,
Word, Excel, Access, and so on are written in C or C++. But to
write such software, you will have to continue learning C++.
C++ is a language where one can not do much with a little
knowledge, it is better either not to learn it at all or to
invest a lot of time to C++, common libraries and coding. I
agree to other posters that usually it is not a good choice as
a first language ?to learn programming?. Java is easier for
this purpose, and one can do many things with its standard
edition one can not do with standard C++, like writing GUI
software, accessing the internet, or accessing the file
system. And it has a garbage collector that makes memory
management easier.
See also:
http://norvig.com/21-days.html