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.
It’s a real story!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz-the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/
At the beginning of the 20th century Henry Ford’s electrical engineers had issues they could not solve with a gigantic generator. Henry Ford called Steimmetz, a genius mathematician working for GE to help them.
When he arrive at the factory he spent 2 days and night listening to the generator and scribbling on his notebook.
After that he asked for a ladder, climbed on it, put a chalk mark on a specific spot and explain to the engineers that they needed to remove the plate and replace sixteen windings behind the plate. After that the generator worked perfectly and Ford received a $10 000 bill.
Ford asked for an itemized bill and Steinmetz sent this
- Making chalk mark on generator $1.
- Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Ford paid the bill.
That’s so badass haha
It’s funny reading this, because the way I heard the story was as a railroad story.
The train engine wouldn’t run. The expert was called, he arrived, and after inspecting the train engine, knew exactly were to apply a little bit of oil to make it run again. His bill was challenged as being overly expensive, and he countered with them paying for the knowledge of where to apply to oil, not the oil itself.
There’s like all these different versions of the same philosophy of the story
Yeah, but companies everywhere have just laid off the 10% who could do that.
You can Google that too 🤷🏻♂️
“I don’t know shit! I just have, like, a really good memory.”
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#. 🤤
If the devs are really exhausted and sad you can’t go wrong with bringing them a Java while they’re dealing with their latest Brainf**k . Knowing various languages helps you to C#, as long as you take good care of your eyes!
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
it’s a great candidate. It was my first “real” languages (i.e. the first language, that is not php/js)
you have a text file. then call the compiler on it, and then you have a exe file, that you can run. It does exactly what it is supposed to do without thinking about the browser, the webserver, the JVM, or some other weirdness.
I get, that doing “good cpp” is difficult. And using all the weird languages features is difficult. But as long as you use strings, ints, ifs, fors, you should be fine. Just don’t use generics, templates, new (keep everything on the stack), multi-inheritance, complex libraries, and it’s a nice beginner language.
Yeah. My intro programming classes used C and C++ and they were great for illustrating the fundamentals. Plus I think it’s important to learn the building-blocks/history
Maybe it’s C that’s a good first language, though I would admit that the basic ouputting of values to stdout is more intutive in C++.
this
std::cout << "hello world"bullshit is in no way intuitive. You’re using the bit-shift operator to output stuff to the console? WTF? Why 2 colons? What is cout? And then these guys go on to complain about JS being weird…No, C is where it’s at:
printf("hello world");is just a function call, like all the other things you do in C.
Go is just as easy. Install the compiler, write a file, compile it, get an exe. And a lot less foot-guns.
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Oh yeah, if you know C can be way more convenient depending on the language features you care about (as long as you thread very carefully when doing type punning, which you would rarely want to).
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.
Just checking an art degree guide: https://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/architecture-course-4-b/
One of the classes that can be chosen is: 6.4400 Computer Graphics, which has a programming 101a/b class as a prereq (granted, it uses python instead of C++, but pretty sure they used C++ as their language-of-choice for the programming 101 language until recently).
Given the variety of digital art (video games, VTube avatars/VR avatars, more traditional-style digital art, etc), having the tools to make those kinds of things can be useful for making responsive/interactive digital art.
I’m currently working in game making and a ton of tools for things like 3D model creation (such as Houdini or Substance) use some form of procedural generation where at least understanding programming concepts is important and actual programming is required to do the more advanced stuff.
A elegant and beautiful piece of code is art.
Even in c++
Especially if you manage to do it in c++
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.
40 years ago at UCLA, I had to do my FORTRAN programs on punch cards submitted through the batch system. The CS/Math department (no CS department then), only offered 1 section in FORTRAN with 40 others in PASCAL. And it was taught by an Engineering professor. Why would a Chemistry major take a computer science class? Remember all those shiny machines CSI uses to do forensic analysis? They came from chem labs.
I get if that’s what you want to get into, but if I was aiming to be a Linux System Engineer (like I currently am), I’d never 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?”
Oh shit. That’s the secret weapon that will get me ahead of my colleagues! I can’t believe I’d never thought of it.
