[penguicon-general] A couple of thoughts about programming

[Rob Landley]

On Tuesday 01 May 2007 1:56 pm, Clay Dowling wrote:
> You definitely shouldn't look at the burnbox code when I put it online
> then.  Not gonna make you very happy at all.

Wasn't planning on it.

> Did somebody inflict code maintenance on you recently Rob?

I maintain open source projects, code maintenance is pretty much a constant 
background task with me.

In 2005, I had a 3-month contract at Dell.  That was the place that 
wrapped "extern c" around a function that returned a pointer to a C++ class, 
put that function in a shared library, then tried to link a version of the 
library built in India with RHEL's 2.96 against a library locally built gcc 
3.0.  They needed to keep a copy of Red Hat Enterprise 2 around after it was 
end-of-lifed so they could compile their app.

Before that, the worst code I'd ever deeply studied was IBM's "Feature 
Install" for OS/2, circa 1995.

My point is that colleges teaching C++ and thinking they're teaching C by 
doing so (since C++ includes C, doesn't it?) are being just as 
counterproductive as they were 10 years ago when they taught Pascal as the 
standard introductory programming language and thought they were actually 
accomplishing something useful.

If you want to learn C++ _after_ learning C, that's one thing.  But that's not 
how it's taught, and that's sad.

Rob