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In my opinion, a multi-paradigm language isn't a good beginner language.
Programming languages evolved in a particular order and I believe they (or their paradigms  ) should be learned in that order. Not specifically start with COBOL or Fortran, but a language like that -- see what you can and can't do easily with it. Then learn the next paradigm/language and see how it improves on the other.
I remember first learning BASIC in high school -- at one point we were assigned a task that was tedious with what we'd been taught so far, then we were shown arrays! And were told to redo what we had previously done and it was so much easier! The same thing happened with Pascal -- records! And then Data Structures! And then OOP!
I think it's wrong to start out having to learn OOP before you know the fundamentals.
You give a kid a hammer, not a nail gun.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: I think it's wrong to start out having to learn OOP before you know the fundamentals.
I totally agree. I think this is a particular problem in the Java world. For example, there is a book called "Objects with Java" which teaches right from the very first page about classes. Get this, that's before it has even covered: printing to the screen, conditional statements, hell even before it teaches how to add two numbers up!
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That's exactly the problem. The VB.net book I bought a few years back doesn't have if until page 353, chapter 18. It's a lot of money and trees to not teach programming.
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Like you, I am programmer, interrupted. Unfortunately, our understanding of interruption and remedies for them are not too far from homeopathic cures and bloodletting leeches. But what is the evidence and what can we do about it? Every few months I still see programmers who are asked to not use headphones during work hours or are interrupted by meetings too frequently but have little defense against these claims. I also fear our declining ability to handle these mental workloads and interruptions as we age. Stop working for a minute and read this.
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Work related interruptions, I can deal with...it's part of the job. The frequency of work related interruptions, for me, has remained fairly steady through the years. However, the frequency of non-work related interruptions (ocurring during working hours) has gone through the roof all due to one device...the cell phone. (leash) 
There used to be a rule about not calling people at work unless it was an emergency. That rule seems to no longer apply...it's not like they are calling your work number right?..and everything is an emergency.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I put my phone on vibrate. If it's important, they'll leave a voicemail, which I'll listen to at my leisure.
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And people wonder why I normally leave my phone at home. 
Only a handful of people outside of work that I trust implicitly not to call for anything that can wait have my deskphone number (in a real emergency the rest could Google the main number and get forwarded by the receptionist). So far all the people in the know have honored my trust; the least important thing I've been called about in the not quite eight years I've spent in this job was someone being in the ER and scheduled for an appendectomy a few hours later.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Dan Neely wrote: I normally leave my phone at home.
I would love to do that but my cell phone is paid for by the company. The worst offenders (calling during work hours) are retired in-laws. My father in-law calls constantly for petty crap like how to change the input oh his TV to watch a DVD, or like yesterday when he couldn't find the right channel for a basketball game. I looked it up and told him the channel to punch in the remote at which point he starts pushing the numbers on the phone! While I am trying to get him to stop pushing the buttons on the phone, I can hear him in the background cursing that 'the damned thing still doesn't work!'. It was a big laugh when he realized what he was doing. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I'd probably insist on a separate number in that case and "forget" that phone in the office almost as often as I "forget" my personal phone at home.
All sarcasm aside I actually do legitmately forget my phone almost half the time I intend to drag it with me.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Oracle's Java plugin for browsers is a notoriously insecure product. Over the past 18 months, the company has released 11 updates, six of them containing critical security fixes. With each update, Java actively tries to install unwanted software. Here's what it does, and why it has to stop. We've secretly replaced the fine Java they usually serve with insecure browser toolbars. Let's see if anyone notices...
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What is up with the URL of this page? It shows up as "http://www.codeproject.com/insider.aspx/elm����lass=fly?msg=4478280#xx4478280xx". I have never seen those characters in a URL before 
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What's worse; they also install Java at the same time. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
 2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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You know what? We - the UNIX community - only ever borrowed/co-opted Linux, because it was the easiest, cheapest way to get a mostly (or occasionally better) UNIX experience on the kind of hardware we could afford. But it turns out that Linux wasn’t really meant for us, and doesn’t care about that stuff; it has wider ambitions. Whether those ambitions will turn out to be worthless once the destination is reached, because the party has moved on, time will tell. The old-school UNIX Philosophy versus the FreeDesktop Linux OS philosophy.
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Every industry has its snake oil, and software is no different. A program for Windows 8 called Memory Optimizer from Softorino recalls perhaps the greatest scam program of all time, SoftRAM from Syncronys Softcorp. Memory Optimizer doesn't appear to be fraudulent like SoftRAM, but it is every bit as useful. It slices! It dices! But does it do anything else?
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For many, XP might seem like a distant memory, but... around one in four PCs still runs that operating system, and in some locales (for example, China), its share rises significantly. With Microsoft unable or unwilling to enable XP to run IE9 or later, this means IE8 will likely have a very long tail in terms of usage, not least due to, as Hunt notes, many organisations having a ‘standard’ OS environment that doesn’t allow more modern XP-compatible browsers to be installed alongside the ageing IE8. Are you ready to pull the plug on XP and IE8?
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I'm glad to see Microsoft going down this path. The past few years have been littered with form factor confusion, and while I don't have clear visibility to what will ultimately emerge as the "right" ones, I do believe there's currently room for something in between a tablet and a notebook. Microsoft remains ahead of the curve in building tablet/notebook convergence devices. Unlike Apple however, Microsoft doesn't have the luxury of showing up to an uncrowded market. As a result, Microsoft has to work a lot harder to convince folks that Surface is a platform worth using - the initial flaws are less excusable when the market is full of mature competitors. It's a tablet. No, it's a laptop. No, it's... Surface Pro!
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Beginners to C++ programming find the concept of pointers foreign to them. Pointers, and code that manipulates pointers (aka pointer arithmetic), can even be daunting to some of the most seasoned programmers. Pointers in C++ account for a fair share of bugs in programs due to the lack of understanding. So why even use them? Well, besides being the most problematic, they are also some of the most powerful features in the language. Handy pointers for using pointers.
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My Computer Science professor liked to carry around a briefcase and point to it while saying "pointer to the handle."
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Bob Dole The internet is a great way to get on the net.
2.0.82.7292 SP6a
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I've asked this question during interviews. Usually Java programmers are really confused... I don't understand why some schools would teach Java instead of C/C++? Obviously C is the language of real programmers...
Ok enough rant-ing and onto the question:
1. Copying by values vs copying by reference. Obviously passing a pointer to something is much more efficient than doing actual deep copy.
2. All high level languages do is hide the pointers from you, but anytime you index an array pointer arithmetic is being done in the background. Back in the day the stl containers were not available and pointer arithmetic was being used as a iterator of sorts. It still can be used to deconstruct binary memory into objects (perhaps when accessing shared memory created by an application written in some arcane language).
3. Function pointers can be used to simulate polymorphic behavior in a procedural language (like C or Fortran).
4. Most important in my mind is the fact that if you understand pointers and memory, you'll be able to write better code. You'll be able to do your own memory management which could be more efficient.
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VentsyV wrote: I don't understand why some schools would teach Java instead of C/C++?
Because when they last started evaluating their language of choice for CS101 it looked like Java was going to conquer the world. In another 5-10 years I expect to see JavaScript take over. Perhaps more importantly it sidestepped the epic holywar between adherents of the MSVC++ and GCC compilers. When I was a freshman ('99); the net result of this was that the "official" compiler for intro C++ classes was Borlands.  In all but one of my more advanced C++ classes we were allowed to use the compiler of our choice as long as it was specified; the exception was my OS class where the binaries we had to use for all the parts of the OS that we weren't writing fill in the function code for were only available on via the Universities Slowlaris shell server.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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A colleague of mine told me about a nice tool for WPF developer: Snoop. It’s somehow like Firebug – just for WPF applications. For those who don’t know firebug: with this tool it is possible to analyze websites and change parameters. Snoop itself is an open source project and you can download it on Codeplex or GitHub. The installation is quick and after the start you will see this little list.... With the help of this list you are able to search for current WPF applications or choose an WPF application with the “target”. Now you will see the object tree – alike firebug – including the characteristics and possible Binding-errors... What other tools are you using for WPF development?
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I ran across a method that returned an IEnumerable<t> recently, and I implicitly typed its return value. During the course of a series of method extractions, code movement, and general refactoring, I wound up with some code that passed the various unit tests in place but failed curiously at runtime. After peering at it for a few minutes and going through once in the debugger, I traced it to a problem that you don’t see every day, and one that probably would have had me tearing my hair out if I didn’t have a good working understanding of what the “yield” keyword in C# does. So today, I’ll present the essence of this problem in the hopes that, if you weren’t aware of it, you are now. Understanding the IInnumerable pitfalls of deferred execution.
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