scott wrote:

> But his reasoning always seems to be based on using some ancient 
> compiler for 5 minutes 20 years ago.

1. It was 10 years ago, not 20.

2. It was 6 months, not 5 minutes.

3. I think this horse is now well and truly dead. ;-)

> I really don't believe that if he 
> sat down for an hour with a "learn C" book, he couldn't pick it up.

When I was a lad, I was always hearing about how C was this "ultimate 
programming language" and how it was the "most powerful" language and 
how BASIC and Pascal were mere toys for amatures. Anyway, when I heard 
that next semester we'd be doing C, I took it upon myself to borrow a 
book about it from the college library.

Frankly I lost interest when I learned that C doesn't even distinguish 
Booleans from integers - but they don't let you pass a module just 
because you've lost interest. So when the semester actually started, I 
made an effort to learn.

I did eventually get a moderately complex program to work. But basically 
every time my program didn't work, I'd replace the implementation with 
an equivilent but differently worded one until the program actually 
worked. (Presumably my idea of "equivilent" doesn't agree with C's.) 
Fortunately, my program involved no string manipulation of any kind. In 
fact, about all it did involve was doing calculations and writing pixels 
to the screen using Borland's proprietry video API.

> Not given the number of other more complex languages he's picked up.

You are seriously claiming that there are languages which are "more 
complex" than C?

> The 
> mistakes that he always cites (like printf crashing the machine with 
> beeps etc) are common newbie mistakes, but nothing that won't be caught 
> by a modern OS/compiler and fixed with a 1 minute lesson.

I gather C++ fixes this anyway.

Given that C++ is supposed to be "like C but better" (or more exactly, 
"like C but object-oriented"), this is also a language I took a look at.

My dad has a "learn C++ in 21 days" book. (Given my dad's inumerable 
misunderstandings about computer technology, this is quite amusing.) So 
one day I sat down and had a look.

The first few chapters look almost exactly like a C tutorial. There's no 
printf(), but everything else seems exactly the same. Only much later in 
the book does it even start to talk about features I haven't seen 
before. It strikes me that this is very probably the wrong way to go 
about learning C++.

Anyway, again when I learned that dynamic binding is an extra feature 
that you have to manually tern on, I kind of lost interest. (Plus my 
head was spinning by the time I'd finished reading about the inner 
complexities of pointers vs references, copy constructors, etc.) I'm not 
sure if C++ really is this hard or whether the book was just badly 
written, but it sure did an efficient job of putting me off.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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