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Search - "compiler magic"
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Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.
Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)
Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.
Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.
Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.
Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.
Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)
When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.
Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)
Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)
And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?
Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.
For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)
Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.
Teach them advanced google searches.
Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.
Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>6 -
I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.
My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.
Here’s the story:
Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.
But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.
Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.
I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.
I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.
And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.
Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.
But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.
Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.
Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.4 -
Am I the only one who enjoys learning low languages like C/C++ and absolutely hate Java (seriously FUCK Java so much I hate using it)
Working with pointers and just having the compiler completely explode in your face because you forgot a semicolon or an index out of bounds maybe a bracket just disappeared and you are frustrated but then you fix it and voila it works like magic.
Maybe it's just a thing of mine because C++ was the first programming language I learned and I miss this feeling of hopelessness (I think I might have done BDSM fetishes) and it makes me feel nostalgic.
When I was first learning them all I thought about was how cool this stuff is.19 -
New team, same discussions...
* Why should we use cmake? It is way better to add visual studio project files to the repository and allow everyone to mess around in the compiler setting dialogs. Nobody needs cmake if not targeting multiple platforms!
* clang-format? What kind of black magic is this? It is way better to manually try to stick with each source file's existing formatting - regardless of how messed up it is - and manually check that from time to time!
* Why should we use the latest visual studio 2019 compiler, if 2017 and 2015 do just fine? This way we can save license fees!
/irony off
Just to mention a few highlights...13 -
When it comes to the idea of programming and magic, or the comparison between software developers/engineers, computer scientists etc as magicians or wizards, nothing brings the idea much more close to hearth than the C programming language.
A while ago I read the R.A Salvatore books concerning Drizzt, the dark elf. I loved the books, have not continued reading them but I remember them vividly. There was one book in which a human magician came about wielding extremely explosive magic, humans were capable of channeling large amounts of it through explosive and unwieldly ends.
This is the same feeling I get from C
Consider:
int items[] = {1, 2, 3};
printf("Third : %i\n", 3[items]);
and fuck me if shit like the above is not dangerous, it makes sense, arrays have the first items of it server as the pointer address to a first element, doing the above operation returns the third element of the array of 3. But holy shit if I don't think this is dangerous and interesting as fuck
there are many more examples I have that I am finding through me fucking around with: language development (compiler, interpreter), kernel programming as well as net sec. C is the most powerful and devastating thing we have in our hands indeed.7 -
"Reflective" programming...
In almost every other language:
1. obj.GetType().GetProperties()
or
for k, v in pairs(obj) do something end
or
fieldnames(typeof(obj))
or
Object.entries(obj)
2. Enjoy.
In C++: 💀
1. Use the extern keyword to trick compilers into believing some fake objects of your chosen type actually exist.
2. Use the famous C++ type loophole or structured binding to extract fields from your fake objects.
3. Figure out a way to suppress those annoying compiler warnings that were generated because of your how much of a bad practice your code is.
4. Extract type and field names from strings generated by compiler magic (__PRETTY_FUNCTION__, __FUNCSIG__) or from the extremely new feature std::source_location (people hate you because their Windows XP compilers can't handle your code)
5. Realize your code still does not work for classes that have private or protected fields.
6. Decide it's time to become a language lawyer and make OOPers angry by breaking encapsulation and stealing private fields from their classes using explicit template instantiation
7. Realize your code will never work outside of MSVC, GCC or CLANG and will always be reliant on undefined behaviors.
8. Live forever in doubt and fear that new changes to the compiler magic you abused will one day break your code.
9. SUFFER IN HELL as you start getting 5000 lines worth of template errors after switching to a new compiler.13 -
Have some downtime today, so since I lucked out and found some old backups (from before I used Git) of a project I was planning on revisiting, I decided to fire it up and see what I can do to get that going again.
And discovering just how much my coding style has changed since then...
[Code is in PHP, for reference]
* Virtually no documentation (whereas my current style is near-obsessive with PHPdoc blocks)
* Where comments exist, they only use // and are a full tab after the end of the line
* All assignment operators are dutifully aligned on tabs
* Have to update the entire codebase because it relies on deprecated `mysql_*` calls
* Have to flip all of the quotes throughout the codebase because I used double-quotes as my primary at the time instead of single quotes.
* Also relied on magic quotes for injecting variable content into strings
* Associative array practices varied; sometimes the names are encased in double quotes, but I just hit a block where it's all leaving it to the compiler to interpret unquoted string literals
And perhaps the most egregious so far...
* Any time we get database results back the process for cycling through them is to do `$count = mysql_num_rows($result);` (or $count2, etc.), then do a `for ($i = 0; $i < $count; $i++)` (again, or $j, $k, etc.), instead of just a simple `while ($data = $result->fetch_assoc())`2