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Originally Posted by lestro
Hey Will,
how much knowledge do you think is necessary to be able to write this kind of program on your own, with no guidance whatsoever? I'm going to start my third year of CS, and I definitely wouldn't be able to think of every function like in the vid. I'm asking only about function/class definitions, because python after using c++ (we only do c++) is ridiculously easy to operate.
Well if it looked easy on video, it's because I planned ahead of time. Also I've written similar programs a few times previously. Certainly things didn't go in such a linear fashion the first time. You make one pass at things, then you decide you need some more methods, or you should have designed something or other differently, etc. But yea, there's pretty much no way I could have made a series like this using C++.
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Originally Posted by lestro
Another question if you have time: How can one learn about code optimization on his own? Board files taking up xxMB of space seem extremely large, also some of the calculations in the video would probably use some optimization.
Optimization isn't something I know a ton about. I guess there are different kinds of optimization corresponding to the different resources you might want to minimize the use of. For RAM, I can't really think of anything more specific than to say -- figure out what part of your program is using a lot of memory (and that's pretty obvious in our case) and then try to make that part use less (and 3 or 4 ways of doing that are described above).
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Btw. First book said you're Mathematics graduate, but then you take a job at Google. So you also did CS?
Um, well in college I double majored in physics and cs/math joint. (I don't think it's common, but my school offered a cs/math joint major which is one degree where you do some cs and some math and some stuff on the border between them.) And then my graduate degrees are in materials science, but my research was essentially all computational physics.
I forget what it said in my author biography blurb or whatnot, but I usually simplify the story unless people really want to know.
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PS. I asked a question in the vol. 2 thread a while ago. Did you choose to ignore it, or you haven't been looking in that thread?
I've been trying to answer questions in order. If I've responded to a more recent question since you asked, then I ignored it, unintentionally, and please remind me in that thread. Otherwise, I just haven't gotten to it yet. I'm a little bdhind.