Trying to learn C++ but falling at the first hurdle.

[fractionMan]

Like I said, my 4 year old finds it easier. It came ready installed on his dell netbook and everything just works. No "ifs".

He's not got years of windows behind him I guess.

 

[longdog]

Like I said, my 4 year old finds it easier. It came ready installed on his dell netbook and everything just works. No "ifs".

I'm guessing that the Linux distro installed was designed specifically to work with that machine so you really would expect it to work straight out of the box.

You can't really compare it to installing on a random PC.

He's not got years of windows behind him I guess.

Which is a point a lot of the Linux freaks choose to ignore.

 

[jayeola]

That's why open-source compilers are handy. You can use them anywhere... (And if you get your hands dirty on the command line you'll learn more than getting an IDE to handle it for you...)

That's how I got into *nix in the first place. I think it may have been a post circa 2003. I tried using a free borland compiler to learn C. Within the first week I saw a shitty feature by which floats were not handled correctly. I posted here. Was pointed to gcc.. been *nix since then

http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=70325&highlight=compiler

 

[Jonti]

That's a great thread, jay!

I wish I'd learned C (I've had a fiddle from time to time and can read simple code) but workwise I've needed first COBOL, then a 4GL COBOL generator, then RPG (you can think of this as IBM's idea of COBOL -- structurally very similar, but far more concise, and has the ability to bit twiddle).

The choice of a programming language for this or that task has to be a matter of horses for courses, but getting a grasp of C is a smart move imho. As Sunray commented in that other thread, it's like abstract assembly. To my mind, that suggests it's a great choice for a first language if one is serious about programming.

Loved this snippet from that thread as well ...

A friend of mine for his masters in programming re wrote the DOS 6 in Visual studio 7 and compiled it to see the size difference.

Not bad only a stonking 70mb compared to the 640K of original DOS.

So that's over 1000 times as much binary blob to do the same job

 

[jayeola]

Indeed. There is so much choice out there. C is the daddy of the *nixes.