If its common in the area - I guess that makes it less unprofessional? Societal norms and all that.

I swear quite a bit (too much, to be honest) but I manage to make it through interviews without dropping any bombs. I remember interviewing one guy that dropped at least one f-bomb/minute. He didn't get the job. It's one of those things where its not the specific act that's necessarily the problem, but the lack of judgement/self-control that the action seems to imply.

I have probably sworn while interviewing people, but would really really try to avoid to swear when interviewing, like jj said societal norms, etc.

I wouldn't drop an f-bomb, but I might say something like "that is some cool interesting sh.it" if I am in a conversation with the person.

We used to not be allowed to swear in the office when I started, and it was pretty difficult for me to deal with it. Fortunately we have hired people who have revolted against that policy and everyone can curse freely now and it is great.

**** not cursing

There is no reason to ever use C on hardware that supports C++. Is C more efficient or faster than C++? Maybe in theory, but in practice it doesn't matter.

There is a common trap for beginner programmers to focus too much on efficiency and optimization. You should instead focus on just getting **** done. That means you should pick a language that allows you to get **** done easily. Anything else is a secondary consideration. Later on learn how to get **** done correctly by making well designed, maintainable and testable code. Sometimes the language choice will help with that, most of the time its just up to you learning how to be a good programmer.

Once you have gotten your **** done, then start figuring out how to optimize it. In most cases, you won't have to. It will be good enough. In the cases you do have to optimize, 99.999999% of the time you will achieve it with better design, not with a faster language.

If you end up being in the 0.000001% that need a faster language, congrats. You have permanent job security now.

When I was learning C++ (back in the dark ages) we were told rather than it being an object oriented language, that it was a language that supported object oriented programming. I think that was a fair assessment as, particularly for those of us coming from a C background, it was pretty easy to write procedural code masquerading as object oriented.

Knowledge of C is still useful - even some of the frameworks you encounter when programming for iOS and OS X make use of it - but C++ is probably more useful to you.

Not Apple but I have an LG Urbana. Top use cases:
- Get time
- Read Instant Messages/quickly decide if it's important
- Read mail, same
- Google maps for navigation when walking (might not apply to US of A)
- Not much else (don't golf, no fitness tracking needed etc.)
Still worth it AINEC

I think we should let Linus Torvalds chime in here:
-- http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus

Fun drama aside, and as someone who began learning programming with C++, my opinion is that using C++ to learn programming is one of the worst mistakes a programmer can make. So just beware. It's basically the equivalent of someone who wants to be a novelist spending the first 6 months of his career learning all the ins and out of vim, since hey, you need a text editor and a computer to write....

I'm not sure I've ever seen an appeal to Linus Torvalds on the internet that didn't feature a quote I thought made him look like a blathering idiot. Maybe that's part of the joke and I'm not in on it, idk.

The last one before this (encountered at work) was him opining that you're stupid if you think you should let your text viewer wrap lines for you instead of wrapping yourself at a fixed point when you write the original text. (mind you, this isn't code line endings we're talking, but text!) I would pull the original quote but for some reason github refuses to load the pull request it was in.

It loads on my phone (but not desktop, and a proxy website couldn't load it either) for some reason, here it is:

Wrapping plain text messages at the edge of the window: too complicated for modern tools, they just can't figure that **** out.

(there are for sure other reasons to hard wrap commit messages and I'm not saying you shouldn't, but this argument in particular is so ****ing bad)

That post was for pure entertainment. In this case, I happen to agree with him, but in general yes, he can be an ass.

I think his problem with C++ is mainly that it allows people who don't understand low-level programming to write bad low-level code without realizing it. I don't think he cares about language design per se - it seems that every time he's asked about programming language he ends up talking up Basic:

Well I would say it depends. Certainly if you aren't planning to develop software in the problem domains that C++ addresses then sure don't bother with it at all.

I really can't get my head around people learning C in the abstract tbh. For me to actually gain a full understanding of C, I had to learn a fair amount about processor architectures and actually do a lot of assembly language production code. The history of C is such that it was developed to be a step up from assembly language in that it was designed to he portable but still close to the machine. I think it is pretty clear that the "closer to the machine" your programming language is the less productive a developer is. Of course it depends on how you measure productivity. Programming an application in something like C# will take less time than programming the same application in C generally speaking.

Agree with you about what Torvalds point is and it is a valid point in my view.

Going for 3 in a row.

Pretty accurate but you also have automatic (stack) allocations and static allocations. To program effectively in C you should understand when it is appropriate to use each.

Ok

Not exactly, in C++ structs and classes are pretty much the same except for some defaults.

Not necessarily, often C++ would be better. If for no other reason STL.


C++ 11 has made C++ more flexible, it is an improvement, but presents some very significant challenges in grasping the new concepts,

C++ structs and classes are basically the same but C structs vs C++ classes are very different (no methods in C structs), I think that's probably what he meant.

first semi(?)-technical interview tomorrow for a programming position

crazy nervous and can barely remember how to type, let alone make functional code. That's normal, right?

A previous job suggested putting out a curse jar and semi-joked that it should be glued to my desk. That got nuked because I complained that I bought all of the coffee creamer for my office mates every week. I've managed to tone it down over the years.

I don't really mind a slip-up in an interview. I think just about every interviewer ever accidentally let an f-bomb out. It is just odd because some of them drop these words every few sentences. Considering many of these are "cultural fit" interviews at restaurants, bars, and coffee shops, I'm kind of like, well... I do curse, but I feel that my biting sarcasm has better punch with other creative word strings.

It s more like... if they say it once, does that mean they expect me to say it? If they say it 3 times, 10 times. Is there a ratio here? lol.

Yes, it is normal. The more often you do it, the more you stop caring about it. You just accept what you don't know, say it, see if you can't learn something new, and move on.

Back when IT had style. http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/this-...ium=socialflow

World is ending!

lmfao please tell me that is shopped

Sadly not shopped. Github was some sort of down for a few hours today and that was the display

i'm saying it's a bad base. it's all implementation detail (and syntactic detail). i'm comparing it to a course like SICP, which imo gets everything right in terms of priorities. even if you knew you wanted to be a game programmer, or something else where C++ makes sense in some cases, you still shouldn't start with it. you'll never be able to see the forest (at least, it will take you so much longer in the best case outcome, and in the worse case ruins you for life). i guess in the hypothetical game if you knew you wanted to be a kernel programmer and never anything else, then fine, just start with C -- but that's so implausible we can dismiss it out of hand.

That's been Dan Shaw's twitter avatar for a while. https://twitter.com/dshaw

Some JS guy I follow, not sure where I picked him up.

All,

Thank you for your comments on C and C++, I found them interesting and illuminating. I do have a follow up question.

Is one of the languages more suited to writing malware and exploits? Maybe C because it gives you greater control over memory allocation?