Re: Learning C++
"Jorgen Grahn" <grahn+nntp@snipabacken.se>
I don't have feedback from students, only see what people that practice
do
around. My experience is pretty sour -- I heard too many claims on how
command line, make, (vim, etc) development is good, and how much and IDE
is
just distracton. The I found their work pretty inefficient, doing
extreme
amount of "fiddling".
What kind of fiddling was that? I use Emacs, Make, version control
and the Unix shell are my usual tools, so I have a hard time imagining
what those inefficiencies were.
In my terminology emacs is an IDE by most practical means...
"fiddling" I mean extra time/effort spent on loading, reloading sources, go
to desired locations (say where the compile error is), to watch related
code, etc. Also related documentation.
During all the usual cases -- primary code writing, review, raw-compile,
debug...
The Makefile can be an issue if you don't understand that it needs
to capture all dependencies (i.e. you have to have autogeneration
for them, using something like makedepend), or that you can rely on
the default *.cpp -> *.o rules. Once you have seen a decent
Makefile *once*, the problem is gone.
Pobably so -- but the alternative is to not have the whole problem set at
all.
What btw is pretty shocking. I recall Borland 3.x' exported makefile had
just the list of .c sources, and .AUTODEPEND up front -- the dependencies
were compiled into .obj and make itself read them, if the file was present.
20 years ago. Then in today's sytems I still see the need for separete .d
outputs and cryptic rules to make them picked up? It is crazy.
There are various kinds of pressures at my workplace to use Eclipse
For Everything, so I genuinely want to know what, if anything, I'm
missing. Most things I've seen so far have been functions I already
have and use, only here they are wrapped in a clumpsy GUI.
I don;t have any personal experience with Eclipse, have one friend who likes
it all the way, and saw many comments on forums that say it is nuts and very
counter-intuitive.
I think that a person who has sufficient knowledge of programming to
learn
C++ on his/her own, will not have a problem with going barefoot. :-)
You mean a theoretic or a practical problem? ;-))
For example I have no problem wit *ability* to go barefoot. But I
absolutely
refuse to do so unless there is a very good reason. Guess some people
think
it is sexy or romantic -- just as many programmers inclined to recreate
the
wheel instead of use a stock one -- to me that is just excess pain
without
gain.
On Windows with its weak command-line and lack of tools, that seems
likely to be true, but the Unix development environment I mentioned
above doesn't feel very "barefoot" or manual to me.
Just like you have a selection of shells on unix, you can do the same on
windows. And certainly all the unix "tools" are available.
Just appear much less needed.
There was a good joke about ATM with unix interface. ;-) Unfortunately the
keywords are not google-friendly, but I'm sure you can imagine it.
And the point is, that if you can carry out what you want with a single
keypress or click (sometimes with 2, other times with 0) why use more? Why
re-type the info before you (or paste it) if avoidable?
You know, 2 decades ago, when Windows (3.0) started to enter the picture
(and some other shells on DOS), I was a very loud fan of command line and
similar tools. the archives have my posts about how much faster I can do
anything by typing (or selection) than by fiddling with the mouse. And
that was the case too.
Thoug then the filenames were 8.3 and we didn't have too much of them (a 40
Mb disk was quite huge).
But eventually the picture changed -- on one hand the interface improved
drasticly with context menus, on the other the amount of information grew,
and working with text-based proggies became increasingly suboptimal.