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Mine GO BOOM Hunch Hunch What What
Age:40 Gender: Joined: Aug 01 2002 Posts: 3614 Location: Las Vegas Offline
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Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 10:42 pm Post subject: |
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Mr Ekted wrote: | Exactly. Learning Java doesn't get you 1 inch down the road to fundamental knowledge. |
Normally, I'd agree with you, especially about Java. But it can have its place, and as long as you had a good teacher, you can learn the fundamentals of programming: algorithms. Being able to optimize the code is only a small part of being a good programmer.
That said, I think Java is good at what it does, work on many platforms and allows code to be developed quickly. |
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Dr Brain Flip-flopping like a wind surfer
Age:38 Gender: Joined: Dec 01 2002 Posts: 3502 Location: Hyperspace Offline
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Posted: Sun Jun 04, 2006 12:21 am Post subject: |
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Mr Ekted wrote: | Exactly. Learning Java doesn't get you 1 inch down the road to fundamental knowledge. So you will always have to "start from scratch" if you will even EVER try after learning to write cheap and dirty apps. |
I guess we have different goals. Assembly is a tool, not the ultimate language. As I've already stated, the principals Java conveys are very important. It's not a big step from Java to C++, where they can learn all about the hells of passing objects by value, copy constructors, and the almighty buffer overflows. _________________ Hyperspace Owner
Smong> so long as 99% deaths feel lame it will always be hyperspace to me |
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Doc Flabby Server Help Squatter
Joined: Feb 26 2006 Posts: 636 Offline
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Posted: Sun Jun 04, 2006 6:59 am Post subject: |
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Cerium wrote: | Why would anyone say anything about threadding not being possible in VB? They raved about the possiblity of threading when the 'addressof' keyword was added in VB5.
Not to mention, there were also other objects and .ocx utilities which could provide similar behavior. |
But have you ever tried do it
Its easier in vb5 - multithreading acctually works how it is meant to, microsoft broke the "easy" way that used AddressOf and CreateProcess API in vb6 .
I think the leap from java to c++ is massive. Java requires next to zero knowlege of how the computer works. a java program should work the same whatever computer you run it on (that was the whole idea of java!). The entire opeating system is hidden from you. The principals you learn in java can be learnt from any oo language.
Now for alot of crappy apps this doesnt matter alot, they get the job done However when you need high performance then understanding how the computer and OS interact and works becomes important as how else are you going to identify bottlenecks.
Find me a high performance game that is coded in java. They simpley dont exist even though the education ssytem has been churing out litterally thoursands of java programmers. If you want to work in game dev (except on mobile phones) like I do you need to learn c++ end of story. |
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Mr Ekted Movie Geek
Gender: Joined: Feb 09 2004 Posts: 1379 Offline
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Posted: Sun Jun 04, 2006 11:30 am Post subject: |
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Dr Brain wrote: | ...and the almighty buffer overflows. |
You know what kind of person you wall up so they can't hurt themselves? It's called a child. _________________ 4,691 irradiated haggis! |
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Dr Brain Flip-flopping like a wind surfer
Age:38 Gender: Joined: Dec 01 2002 Posts: 3502 Location: Hyperspace Offline
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Posted: Sun Jun 04, 2006 7:35 pm Post subject: |
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I'm not saying it shouldn't be a problem. I'm saying it is. |
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Mr Ekted Movie Geek
Gender: Joined: Feb 09 2004 Posts: 1379 Offline
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Posted: Sun Jun 04, 2006 7:50 pm Post subject: |
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Either you let a programmer do anything, or you hold their hand and police them. You clearly prefer the latter. I look both ways before crossing the street. |
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Dr Brain Flip-flopping like a wind surfer
Age:38 Gender: Joined: Dec 01 2002 Posts: 3502 Location: Hyperspace Offline
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Posted: Sun Jun 04, 2006 8:46 pm Post subject: |
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Mr Ekted wrote: | Either you let a programmer do anything, or you hold their hand and police them. You clearly prefer the latter. I look both ways before crossing the street. |
I'm not advocating keeping programmers in the sandbox forever. I'm saying that they need to stay there long enough to learn the basics. Maybe you look both ways, but new programmers don't, and I don't want to be the one to hit them. |
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Cerium Server Help Squatter
Age:41 Gender: Joined: Mar 05 2005 Posts: 807 Location: I will stab you. Offline
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Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2006 2:25 am Post subject: |
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Awesome, four "child" references in a row. I believe there is another reference to a board game from 20 years ago that can go here, but I cant seem to find it.
Anyway...
Doc Flabby wrote: | But have you ever tried do it |
Yes, as a matter of fact, I have. Its akward because of how addressof works (as opposed to how it SHOULD work). It feels like it was thrown in as a last minute addon to work with some of the winAPI calls that require a pointer to a function.
Doc Flabby wrote: | Its easier in vb5 - multithreading acctually works how it is meant to, microsoft broke the "easy" way that used AddressOf and CreateProcess API in vb6 . |
Wouldnt know. I havent (seriously) used VB since before VB6 was released. _________________ There are 7 user(s) ignoring me right now. |
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Bak ?ls -s 0 in
Age:25 Gender: Joined: Jun 11 2004 Posts: 1826 Location: USA Offline
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Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2006 3:25 am Post subject: |
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is VB interpretted or something? It seems like they took the worse parts of both C++ and Java and combined them into a single language: VB |
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doc flabby_ Guest
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Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2006 12:11 pm Post subject: |
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VB (Visual Basic) is based on BASIC (later QBASIC)
Not to be confused with VB.net which is idential to c# except its syntax is more verbose...
VB is older than java.
VB is not truly object orientated unlike c++ and java.
VB compiles to native windows code, but it can be interpreted for debugging.
Why do i like vb?
Because i can program a quick and dirty app in 30mins that will work on any windows machine without needing a "framework" or "run-time enviroment" ie 20mb of downloads.
Why do i hate vb?
Has stange quirks
If a program gets large the code gets hard to organise.
Memory leaks |
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Cerium Server Help Squatter
Age:41 Gender: Joined: Mar 05 2005 Posts: 807 Location: I will stab you. Offline
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Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2006 12:57 pm Post subject: |
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*ahem*
MSVBVM#.dll
.NET Framework |
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Animate Dreams Gotta buy them all! (Consumer whore)
Age:36 Gender: Joined: May 01 2004 Posts: 821 Location: Middle Tennessee Offline
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Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 11:37 am Post subject: |
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Erm, I think some of you are turning this into a debate of which languages are better... but I'm sure we all know that different languages have different purposes. For example, I hate Java, but it's the ideal client for simple web programs. For example the one I play Go on: http://kgs.kiseido.com . I'm glad they use a Java client, I can't imagine anything else working so well. I've used other online Go and Chess clients, many of them in other languages, and they've all sucked. Granted, a lot of it was just design issues, but I'm sure the creator of KGS learned a lot of his program design when he learned Java.
When it comes to actually learning programming, Ekted's ideas may be the best way to "grow" a programmer... I've said before learning this stuff would be a lot easier if I'd learned everything from the ground up, starting with resistors and lightbulbs. Trying to learn things from the top down is annoying at best, because it's usually not obvious where to go next. But I can't agree with saying learning those things in a classroom setting is a bad idea. I mean, I can't personally imagine sitting through a college programming course for a whole month and not having anything to show for it. I don't know anyone who knows how to program well at all who didn't learn by actually trying to program, and there aren't going to be any beginning programmers who are going to do everything right. It's true that starting off learning C++ strings is going to leave the student confused, but the teacher can just tell him where to look next.
I certainly wouldn't want to learn assembly as my first programming language. Learning C++ has made my first coding attempts buggy, inefficient, and safe. I haven't crashed or frozen any computers, and haven't evoked the BSOD. And when I pass the code along to an experienced programmer, it doesn't take him any work to see what I did wrong and to correct it for me, with comments to show me the right way. As I learn more, I'm starting to prefer C over C++, and I can certainly see why you'd want to start learning at a lower level... I mean, seriously, I don't think anyone should try to understand multiple inheritance at an implementation level unless they've got a ton of experience. But at the same time, object orientation concepts can be learned fully without learning any programming, and I don't see how anyone could think learning it, at any level, could be bad.
A lot of programmers like to learn everything by themselves, but that' a lot different from actually having a teacher. I personally think all teachers, regardless of the language being taught, should teach object orientation from the beginning. A good teacher would make sure the student was never stuck, and wasn't learning any bad programming practices. For the student, it's a lot better to learn int i = 1; and then learn what it means. For a teacher to explain the fundamentals of even a statement as simple as that and then expect the student to be able to regurgitate it and use it flawlessly from there on out is absurd. But at the same time, to force large chunks of programming down a student's throat and expect them to understand the basics behind them isn't going to work, either. In Electronics, no one starts with Solid-State, but no one starts with the theories behind voltage and current, either. People learn circuits... basic circuits, and basic theory. As they learn more, they understand more of the concepts as they need to know it, and they learn about more components, and more complex circuits, etc. There are certain things every coder needs to know, but they can't learn it all at once, and order doesn't change the outcome, does it? SamHughes made the remark he did because it's dumb to say you will never learn in the future because of what you've learned in the past. I've seen a lot of programmers get their start by making webpages, and I don't think any of us would say that's a good start for programming. But they had good teachers who could always tell them where to look next.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is there really isn't any great way to learn to program. There are "dangers" that come with choosing one style of learning over another, but that's just up to the teacher to deal with, right? Nothing you learn will prohibit you from learning the rest, so you might as well start with what seems interesting/useful to you.
P.S. - This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.
And also, the reason this post is so long is because I'm at work, and I'm bored... and I kept coming back to it over a couple hours. |
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Dr Brain Flip-flopping like a wind surfer
Age:38 Gender: Joined: Dec 01 2002 Posts: 3502 Location: Hyperspace Offline
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Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 12:46 pm Post subject: |
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Too long for me to read the whole thing, but what I did read sounds like you don't know what you're talking about.
And you bumped a 6 month old topic. |
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Contempt+ Server Help Squatter
Age:34 Gender: Joined: May 15 2005 Posts: 682 Location: Home Offline
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Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 4:36 pm Post subject: |
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Dr Brain wrote: | And you bumped a 6 month old topic. |
No, he didn't. June was only 1 month ago.
MGBF wrote: | Tue Jun 06, 2006 12:57 pm |
_________________ SSE Network Administrator |
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Dr Brain Flip-flopping like a wind surfer
Age:38 Gender: Joined: Dec 01 2002 Posts: 3502 Location: Hyperspace Offline
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Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 5:06 pm Post subject: |
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My mistake. I read Jan. It's still a needless bump. |
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Cyan~Fire I'll count you!
Age:36 Gender: Joined: Jul 14 2003 Posts: 4608 Location: A Dream Offline
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Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 10:53 pm Post subject: |
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Lightbulbs are resistors, silly! _________________ This help is informational only. No representation is made or warranty given as to its content. User assumes all risk of use. Cyan~Fire assumes no responsibility for any loss or delay resulting from such use.
Wise men STILL seek Him. |
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