I’m spoiled rotten
August 13th, 2007
I’m currently on the long trek to get my masters. Not too long ago (at about 2:20 am) I submitted my NFS implementation. We did everything in user space, so it wasn’t that bad, but about a third of the way through, I realized something: I’m totally spoiled.
You see, our prof wants us to develop this thing with pure C/C++ on Unix. And that’s the problem. The only time I’ve touched a char* (apart from projects for my masters) is back when I was getting my bachelors… a good seven years ago. Ever since then, I’ve been laying back getting fat and lazy by relying on MFC and .NET to do all the dirty work for me. Don’t get me wrong, I like to get back to my roots and fire it up with some void*’s… well, actually, no I don’t… I really really don’t.
What I would really like is to forget they ever existed. I hate reinventing the wheel every time I do a project for school, in the same way that I hate seeing duplicate code in stuff I’m working with on the job. If we never stand on the shoulders of giants… well then we can never really see that far, can we? I mean that’s exactly what the foundation classes and the framework are for, so that we don’t have to spend so much time with these menial chores and memory allocation and reallocation and deallocation and that all that other bullhonkey.
…And that’s why at that 1/3rd way point through my project, I said “screw it” and started writing my own String class (and a few other common ones). In the end, I had a pretty nice little encapsulation (if I do say so myself) complete with size and length functions, find and reverse find, substring, operator overloads (==, +, =, and oh yes even +=) as well as a full array of constructors to suit your every need. Sure it’s a not that big of a deal, but if that helps me deal with actual object 75% more of the time, then I’m all over that.
So now when my next course comes around and the professor bellows out in the most menacing of tones “You’re going to write this in C++ on Unix and you’re going to like it!”, I can just sit back in my chair and say “Bring it”.
The STL’s not pure C++?
Also - where are you going to school?
August 13, 2007 @ 12:58 pm
The way it works is that you have to submit a zip with the source and a readme/report that tells the instructor how to build it. I doubt that including the STL installer would fly. And you never know if they’ll be running it on *nix or on windows under cygwin, so there’s another thing to worry about. But at the same time, I’ve never actually checked with them either. I’ve just assumed that was the case. Thanks for pointing that out.
Anyway, I go to school at Walden University. Yes, it’s an online school, but a) it’s fully accredited, b)I really don’t think I would learn any more if I went to a brick and mortar school, and c) I really couldn’t go to a brick and mortar school due to work and family commitments. It’s pretty nice though because they ship you all the lectures on a DVD (or they can be streamed). You have a course website where you interact with the rest of the class and the instructor. Then when an assignment or project is due, you just upload it on the site. All exams are proctored and then faxed to your instructor. They don’t have a extensive set of courses yet, but you still have a nice selection whether it’s for your MS in computer science or software engineering.
August 13, 2007 @ 1:58 pm
Ahhh C++ and Unix. Some of my favorite things….as long as it’s not Sco
August 21, 2007 @ 10:20 pm