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Police Academy III posted:I've a sneaking suspicion that there's only a very low number of people who are in any way decent at programming, but they've realized that there's no way for them to transmit that knowledge to the rest of us and so are content to let us keep running around like retards and making grand, overly generalized proclamations about programming on hacker news. half right programming was easy for them to figure out so they assume it'll be easy for everyone, RTFM again or maybe you're just a moron who has no business programming
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May 8, 2013 01:25
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I think maybe the community has gotten better, I haven't really paid attention since I stopped following slashdot the problem with programming education is there's so much stuff that's non-obvious and counter-intuitive and it doesn't make "sense' until you've been browbeaten with it enough that you pretend it does, and at that point you still have no idea how to explain it to anyone else best example I can think of is pointers. what is a pointer? a variable that points to another variable. this is a circular definition but it's what's in the books. pointers didn't make sense to me until I started playing with assembly. need to store a string of text, or other multi-word data somewhere? put it somewhere in memory and then write that memory address down somewhere. now you can look up what's at that address and change the data, or you can change the address too maybe. it's like a reference of a memory address that points... at your data. a pointer. C-like languages make this more confusing because it can be hard to tell when you need to "dereference" a pointer or just pass the pointer as-is. You can think of a pointer as a variable that stores an address but you need to have some fairly precise understanding of what variables even are to understand why pointers are useful in the first place and it's just generally not taught
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May 8, 2013 01:39
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hey I forgot this thread existed and it's tl;dr so here's my masters thesis on why ~pointers are hard~ a pointer is a variable that stores a location in memory. ok, that part is easy you "dereference" a pointer by using the * operator. not too hard but the terminology is a little unintuitive oh you have some code that expects a pointer but you need to pass a variable? fine! pass it with the address-of & operator still pretty simple on the surface, but hey this spaghetti code is using pointers and & and you don't know why they use one here and another there and oops you need a pointer here but you don't have one and oops you dereferenced that variable which isn't a pointer &c &c it's a simple concept but bad commenting and handwavey documentation really trips up new programmers
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Jun 4, 2013 06:12
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Cocoa Crispies posted:learned ansi c, only ever professionally worked in the kind of c a 2005-era compiler on a dead unix can use lol might as well use COBOL
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Jun 21, 2013 01:05
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expert sexchange
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Sep 13, 2016 20:02
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gonadic io posted:Run scenario. Add printlines when methods are called. Find where the code breaks, add more printlines in that section, repeat. lol if you haven't had to debug by programming infinite loops of different lengths and identifying them by the noise over an am radio
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Jan 18, 2017 17:34
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HappyHippo posted:wordpad with papyrus font I can get into this
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Jan 25, 2017 22:52
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Luigi Thirty posted:9 processors most of which are on the same memory bus quads are just funy sprites
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Jan 31, 2017 03:11
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