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working her way through C++
part of Digital arts curriculum
Might be too high for this, but what??
Maybe part of a gaming curriculum?
Like, "learn some code so that when the devs are crying you can make small talk?"
Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.
I was Haskalling for that one. I need to Go and shake off the Rust, maybe work on my Lisp to make sure people React well.
Node what I'm saying?
Not Ruby sure what you're saying, but I dream of getting strangled by a Python that can't C#. 🤤
React well
That can only be some sort of evil Scheme, a rather Basic one. I can't even Assembly the proper words to describe the Brainfuck
If the devs are really exhausted and sad you can't go wrong with bringing them a Java while they're dealing with their latest Brainf**k . Knowing various languages helps you to C#, as long as you take good care of your eyes!
But it’s less cruel to students.
C++ is still the far and ahead leader in game programming. All the tools are written in it and everyone is used to it.
C++ is an awful candidate for a first programming language to learn, at least nowadays - it is very powerful, but it's also full of foot-guns and past a certain point the learning curve becomes a wall
it's a great candidate. It was my first "real" languages (i.e. the first language, that is not php/js)
you have a text file. then call the compiler on it, and then you have a exe file, that you can run. It does exactly what it is supposed to do without thinking about the browser, the webserver, the JVM, or some other weirdness.
I get, that doing "good cpp" is difficult. And using all the weird languages features is difficult. But as long as you use strings, ints, ifs, fors, you should be fine. Just don't use generics, templates, new (keep everything on the stack), multi-inheritance, complex libraries, and it's a nice beginner language.
Yeah. My intro programming classes used C and C++ and they were great for illustrating the fundamentals. Plus I think it's important to learn the building-blocks/history
Maybe it's C that's a good first language, though I would admit that the basic ouputting of values to stdout is more intutive in C++.
this
std::cout << "hello world"bullshit is in no way intuitive. You're using the bit-shift operator to output stuff to the console? WTF? Why 2 colons? What is cout? And then these guys go on to complain about JS being weird...No, C is where it's at:
printf("hello world");is just a function call, like all the other things you do in C.For non-programmers (who most definitelly don't know that >> and << are bit shift operators) shoving something into something else is more intuitive than "calling a function with parameters".
Also don't get me started on the unintuitiveness of first passing a string were text is mixed with funny codes sgnaling the places were values are going to be placed, with the values passed afterwards, as opposed to just "shove some text into stdout, then shove a value into stdout, then shove some more text into it".
Absolutelly, once you are used to it, the "template" style of printf makes sense (plus is naturally well-suited for reuse), but when first exposed to it people don't really have any real life parallels of stituations were one first makes the final picture but leaving some holes in it and later fills-in the holes with actual values - because in real life one typically does it all at once, at most by incremental composition such as in C++, not by templating - so that style is not intuitive.
shove some text into stdout
That's not what this operator does normally, and if you try to "shove" something into anything else (an int into a variable? a function into an object?) you'll get surprises... Basically it's "special" and nothing else in the language behaves like it. Learning hello world in C++ teaches you absolutely nothing useful about the language, because it doesn't generalize.
C, in contrast, has many instances of complex functions like printf (another commenter mentioned variable arguments), and learning to call a function is something very useful that generalizes well to the rest of the language. You also learn early enough that each different function has its own "user manual" of how to use it, but it's still just a function call.
C is no beginner heaven either,
printfis its own can of "why can this function have any number of arguments and why does the compiler have to complain about the formatting every 25 milliseconds" worms
Go is just as easy. Install the compiler, write a file, compile it, get an exe. And a lot less foot-guns.
Basic C++ isn't really confusing (if you are not handwriting makefiles). It starts to get fucky when you get into memory handling, templates, etc. I'm assuming they are only using C++ over C for basic OOP (class/structs inheritance etc).
Not really. Pointers are almost always a bad idea - just use const refs and you'll be fine.
If using pointers is out of the question, then why choose to learn a language with explicit memory access before anything else?
I have yet to learn Rust, but from what I hear it's simpler and (mostly?) memory-safe – implying that it's generally a better first language to learn.
Pointers are almost always a bad idea - but you'll probably get a lot of mileage out of having a handful of them in a large project... there's an impulse with new C++ devs to do everything with pointers and use complex pointer arithmetic to do weird array offset and abuse predictable layouts to access stack variables etc.... pointers are fine when used with moderation.
What do you mean? Pointers are the best thing ever. It either works, or you manage to make fireworks!
There are lots of ways computers are used for making art. Not just video-games. For example, projection mapping, algorithmic music composition, live coding, etc.
You can look into openFrameworks for examples of C++ in arts.
I get that, but I would have expected Python.
I think there probably are school where the professor know c++ very well, but never bothered or too stubborn to learn/teach python.
Unlike the top 50 to 60 schools, most schools, especially research universities, don't care that much about teaching (in the U.S., at least).
I would argue that anyone who understands c++ can easily pick up python.
Source: expert in both.
This was the first serious creative coding framework I've learned 2008 or 2010 or something. I have been in this field since then. I have seen Java, Javascript, and kotlin creative frameworks but not python and I am still as surprised as you are.
The Spanish Inquisition, even.
Or libcinder. Or even simply Arduino.
Just checking an art degree guide: https://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/architecture-course-4-b/
One of the classes that can be chosen is: 6.4400 Computer Graphics, which has a programming 101a/b class as a prereq (granted, it uses python instead of C++, but pretty sure they used C++ as their language-of-choice for the programming 101 language until recently).
Given the variety of digital art (video games, VTube avatars/VR avatars, more traditional-style digital art, etc), having the tools to make those kinds of things can be useful for making responsive/interactive digital art.
I'm currently working in game making and a ton of tools for things like 3D model creation (such as Houdini or Substance) use some form of procedural generation where at least understanding programming concepts is important and actual programming is required to do the more advanced stuff.
A elegant and beautiful piece of code is art.
Even in c++
Especially if you manage to do it in c++
I'm very confused as well. Some universities do have ridiculous requirements though. I was planning on being a veterinarian and had to take politics classes. I switched to IT and was required to take general chemistry.
40 years ago at UCLA, I had to do my FORTRAN programs on punch cards submitted through the batch system. The CS/Math department (no CS department then), only offered 1 section in FORTRAN with 40 others in PASCAL. And it was taught by an Engineering professor. Why would a Chemistry major take a computer science class? Remember all those shiny machines CSI uses to do forensic analysis? They came from chem labs.
I get if that's what you want to get into, but if I was aiming to be a Linux System Engineer (like I currently am), I'd never chemistry.
I agree, that only makes sense if it's 1999