Thread: I fail at learning...

  1. #16
    Lurking whiteflags's Avatar
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    Yeah I've noticed that too. As far as I can tell, my local community college is not offering C or C++ during the upcoming fall semester. So either the course book isn't the complete one or they decided Visual BASIC .NET was enough.
    I have a theory: maybe they don't teach C++ in an academic setting because a term is only a couple of months. Initially this sounds like stupid reasoning, but a few moments of thought make the truth clear: any reputable source suggests that C++ takes years to master and wrap your head around descent OOP design and proper C++ constructs and usage.

    With this in mind, no professor wants to do the incorrect thing and try to teach good OOP programming with C++ in one term. That is not effective: CProg would just be swamped with newbies ever stupider than me, and you cannot force students to take C++ Programming I - VII. Thus, we turn to evil Java or something, where the garbage collection helps them avoid C++ pitfalls and lets them learn a first language that is OO-relevant within a academic year. With this knowledge the professor hopes that one day his pupil will apply his OOP design knowledge and use it with C++.

    Of course we are sort of doing this backwards... the new C++ Programmer with experience in Java will access memory that he doesn't own, create zero-length arrays, and not free his memory, ever. He will create singletons out of everything, and give himself a really hard time.

    So unless C++ gets easier or people become really intuitive, academic C++ may never return.
    Last edited by whiteflags; 07-05-2006 at 07:10 PM. Reason: quoting

  2. #17
    Sweet
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    Valid point. But I mean learning the basics of C++ can be put in a semester. Then on the second one more advanced concepts. I would not say mastery or even a great understanding of C++ could be accomplished in 2 semesters(1 year) of school but it definatly would be worth teaching it as it can be related to those other languages such as Java.
    Woop?

  3. #18
    pwns nooblars
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    My CC is still offering it (I am taking it this term) and the course book has it listed for fall term too...

  4. #19
    System.out.println("");
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    I just thought that I would bring up that I recently graduated with a computer engineering degree and my curriculum required only one semester of C programming for engineers (then two semesters of java programming). The C programming was very simple - FILE IO, functions, math computations. Basically we would put or read data from a file, perform some calculations on the data, and then output the results.

    Now that I have done this and went looking on the job market apparently most of the companies expect me to be pretty familiar with C/C++ (in addition to VHDL, Assembly) so here I am trying to learn before and during grad school so I will be more marketable.

  5. #20
    CS Author and Instructor
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    Well I thought it might be time to chime in...
    I teach CS at a Two year college.

    1. C++ is not dead, a real good CC would offer (programming langs): C++, VB. NET, Java, and C#- Those are languages that both academia and industry use

    2. Java is the "in vogue" language now. C++ was a few years ago. C++ is not any harder to learn than Java- well ...

    JC
    Mr. C: Author and Instructor

  6. #21
    Ethernal Noob
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    They teach C++ later in programming III towards the end, and windows programming class of course has C++, but In between Programming III and Windows I don't know what they teach. I love Java though.

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