She’s now qualified to do 90% of my job. Unfortunately the other 10% is explaining why it works.
There’s an anecdote that goes like this:
An important machine in a factory stops working. No matter what they do they can’t get it to work again.
So they bring in a specialist to solve the problem, for an agreed fee of $1000
The guy checks the machine over and then goes and presses a specific button and the machine is back working again.
So the factory manager goes: “All you did was press a button! Why should I pay you $1000 for pressing a button?!”
To which the specialist answers: “Well, you see, you’re paying me just $1 to press the button. The other $999 are for knowing which button to press”.
I heard the same story when I was a kid, but it was about a boilermaker. The rest was for knowing where to tap his hammer to fix their problem.
It’s an obviously apocryphal story with two great messages. First, don’t undervalue your expertise just because the fix was easy (I still have a problem with that). Second, if you don’t know what you’re doing don’t question the expert just because it looked easy.
I know a version with a graphics designer. They designed something in 10 minutes and asked 1000 USD for it. When confronted on why it is so expensive for just 10 minutes of work, the answer is that it’s not just the 10 minutes of work, but also the 10 years of experience that lead to this 10 minutes of work.
That last 10%, my friend, is GPT’s job not mine
working her way through C++
part of Digital arts curriculum
Might be too high for this, but what??
Maybe part of a gaming curriculum?
Like, “learn some code so that when the devs are crying you can make small talk?”
Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.
I was Haskalling for that one. I need to Go and shake off the Rust, maybe work on my Lisp to make sure people React well.
Node what I’m saying?
Not Ruby sure what you’re saying, but I dream of getting strangled by a Python that can’t C#. 🤤
React well
That can only be some sort of evil Scheme, a rather Basic one. I can’t even Assembly the proper words to describe the Brainfuck
But it’s less cruel to students.
C++ is still the far and ahead leader in game programming. All the tools are written in it and everyone is used to it.
C++ is an awful candidate for a first programming language to learn, at least nowadays - it is very powerful, but it’s also full of foot-guns and past a certain point the learning curve becomes a wall
Basic C++ isn’t really confusing (if you are not handwriting makefiles). It starts to get fucky when you get into memory handling, templates, etc. I’m assuming they are only using C++ over C for basic OOP (class/structs inheritance etc).
Not really. Pointers are almost always a bad idea - just use const refs and you’ll be fine.
If using pointers is out of the question, then why choose to learn a language with explicit memory access before anything else?
I have yet to learn Rust, but from what I hear it’s simpler and (mostly?) memory-safe – implying that it’s generally a better first language to learn.
Pointers are almost always a bad idea - but you’ll probably get a lot of mileage out of having a handful of them in a large project… there’s an impulse with new C++ devs to do everything with pointers and use complex pointer arithmetic to do weird array offset and abuse predictable layouts to access stack variables etc… pointers are fine when used with moderation.
What do you mean? Pointers are the best thing ever. It either works, or you manage to make fireworks!
There are lots of ways computers are used for making art. Not just video-games. For example, projection mapping, algorithmic music composition, live coding, etc.
You can look into openFrameworks for examples of C++ in arts.
I get that, but I would have expected Python.
I think there probably are school where the professor know c++ very well, but never bothered or too stubborn to learn/teach python.
Unlike the top 50 to 60 schools, most schools, especially research universities, don’t care that much about teaching (in the U.S., at least).
I would argue that anyone who understands c++ can easily pick up python.
Source: expert in both.
This was the first serious creative coding framework I’ve learned 2008 or 2010 or something. I have been in this field since then. I have seen Java, Javascript, and kotlin creative frameworks but not python and I am still as surprised as you are.
The Spanish Inquisition, even.
Or libcinder. Or even simply Arduino.
I’m very confused as well. Some universities do have ridiculous requirements though. I was planning on being a veterinarian and had to take politics classes. I switched to IT and was required to take general chemistry.
I agree, that only makes sense if it’s 1999
I’ve straight up ripped code from StackOverflow that worked… But I had no idea why or how it worked 😂 I taught myself Go and I’m decent at it, one of my coworkers was a former professional programmer who knew C and could fumble his way through Go. I later told him I had no idea what some of the code did because I did the old copy and paste and he just said “I knew you did” 😂
When someone copies from stack overflow, a reviewer’s first question should be “did you copy the question or the answer?”
