re: #32 thedopefishlives

The first language we learned at my college (and I don’t know if it’s still that way) was C++. Period. If you survived that, we branched out a little bit, but the core of our education was C++ with the occasional drop into C for when we did the Linux kernel module in our operating systems class. Granted, this was before .Net became big, but it was during Java’s heyday and we really didn’t do a lot with that. I’m kind of glad, in retrospect. C++ programming taught me to respect the pointer.

They have a lot of non-CS students take the first quarter class, so I think having it in Java and teaching some of the broader concepts that way is part of their goal. Of course, the next quarter, you start learning pointers and seeing some of the mystique pulled away and then the third quarter it’s like HERE’S WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING and it made a lot of sense.

Although the backtranslate from Assembly to C on the final made me very grumpy. “You should be able to tell from the optimized code that this reference to some other string at address xxxxxxx is an empty string based on your knowledge of how well gdb knows strcmp!” Bull-fucking-shit.