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Undergrads are stupid? Blame the universities for teaching C and Java

Name: Anonymous 2017-08-14 23:08

https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/g/thread/61460559/
/g/ is where CS undergrads hang out. The quality of knowledge of /g/ reflects the quality of their education.

In Brazil you have C in introductory classes, second semester is C and assembly. Why are american CS classes such a joke?

The only way to teach someone properly is:
>pseudoassembly language to make the students get the basic principles of how a computer works (without introducing any platform specific stuff)
>C, to teach basic imperative programming and also memory-related matters
>modern C++ for introduction to OOP, templates etc, and also to make the students understand that automatic memory management is possible without a garbage collector
>a modern OOP language (C#, or possibly Java)
>a meme piece of shit scripting language (most likely Python)
>a pure functional language (most likely Haskell)
>SQL, an actual assembly language and webshit languages (Javascript, HTML, CSS) somewhere along the way

This way you get the full picture, a thorough understanding, and you do it in the proper ascending order of abstraction from the hardware layer.
That's what my university did in my CS course, and it was worth it.
And this order makes retards fail quickly, so here's another upside.

I like Java, its the comfiest language. But I wouldn't trade having my 101 class in C for anything. I believe it was a very valuable experience. Plus, it helped me with OS, Systems programming, and computer architecture later on down the road. Not teaching C just fucks students over later. Maybe it's for the best though cause ee need less JS script fags scraping out a CS degree and calling themselves developers anyway. Stallvolution will eliminate them from the equation.

As a CS major who was taught Java first then C and C++ later. Java was easier to learn, but I wish I was introduced to the complexities of C first. One big thing that I can think of is that Java has a garbage collector so you are basically allowed to write shit code. Once we started learning C, that shit wouldn't fly and the idea of memory allocation was lost on many.

C might be harder to learn, but for CS it's a better foundation imo.

Name: Anonymous 2017-08-17 1:34

>>25
Nobody understands C syntax completely. C++ is even less completely understood. The tricks that allow Duff's device and Pigeon's device are part of the syntax of C. There are more ``devices'' waiting to be discovered. You might think it's clever to be able to do this without goto, but that makes the C syntax very complicated. It makes optimizers more complicated. It makes programs harder to read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device
http://pigeonsnest.co.uk/stuff/pigeons-device.html

C syntax and semantics is beyond post-doctorate level work. There have been full semantics of programming languages, some with more features than C, but it has never been done for C despite the efforts put into it. If they finally formalize it, C will still have null-terminated strings, low-quality arrays, and bad control structures. What happened to making programming languages that are easy to understand?

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