Mail Archives: djgpp/1996/12/03/20:24:48
Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > you're an earnest kid, you wanna learn C, you haven't the faintest
> > idea of what the difference is between a compiler,linker,or preprocessor,
> > you have only the foggiest idea of what the difference is between a header
> > file and a C file, and your buddies don't even know (and don't care) what
>
> That's exactly the way I did it. How? I've just Read the Fine Manuals.
> Yes, it does take more than 5 minutes to learn, but I don't have any
> sympathy for those who can't invest more than that in a subject that they
> are supposed to be professional about.
Not everyone has the same patience/ability/autodidactic qualities as you;
people differ. I also taught myself C, and never had any problems
with djgpp, but I have a lot of fellow students who *do* have difficulty
programming ( and they're not neccessarily dumb; I'm a physics major and
some of them get better grades than me :-).
This is especially the case with girls/women; the unfamiliar environment
and lack of sympathy put many off the subject of programming.
I suspect in the case of many comp.os readers it's a case of good
autodidacts and people with an affinity for computers not having
understanding for people lacking these qualities. Like people
who learned to swim without waterwings despising those who needed
water-wings. Or people who learned Esperanto alone out of a book having
no respect for those who had to be tutored.
(Look at the success of Delphi and all the Visual C/Basic/whatevers.)
> > undefined function","cannot run 16-bit program" etc. Would you blame
> > him/her for preferring Turbo C which lets you get on with learning the
> > language without all that extra crap?
>
> What I'm blaming is their colossal impatience. That is the sin these
> people get their punishment for: to be forever stuck with tools which
> pretend to be omnipotent, but are really weak in every single aspect (in
> particular, they are all much less powerful as programmer's editors than
> any decent editor out there).
If you use computers a lot, play games a lot, know and love the DOS/bash prompt
like your best buddy, and habitually run new programs without looking
at the manual, you already have a lot of background knowledge.
But take the girl who shares my workroom: she never had any particular
interest in computers until she had to write a biophysics simulation program in
Think Pascal (for the Mac); she finds the project fun and challenging,
but certainly in the beginning she needed a lot of assistance. She would
have had no use for powerful programming tools in the beginning; learn
the language (pascal) and get on with it -- you can pick up new tools and
environments as the need arises once you know the basics.
What I mean is, Eli and the rest, I'm not being flattering, but I think your
abilities and preferences do not reflect the average. I think newbies who
ask for help would be much better off getting it, than being told off.
Newbies who need water-wings (=Turbo C) may not survive if thrown into the
deep -- they may lose hope and give up.
Newbies who don't need help don't generally ask for it either.
No flame wars please. That was just my opinion.
Elliott
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