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As someone who learned C++ few years back let me tell you that professors in Universities actively discourage use of Boost. There is C++0x or which contains ha

As someone who learned C++ few years back let me tell you that professors in Universities actively discourage use of Boost. There is C++0x or which contains hashset and hashtable but even use of it is discouraged. I think C++ standardization effort has become a joke and I doubt when we will see them being used in real life. Even funny are people who claim to be waiting for emergence of D.(my professor said that he was waiting for andrecue or some one to finish his D book)

ewjordan 16y ago
As someone who learned C++ few years back let me tell you that professors in Universities actively discourage use of Boost. I'm curious - why is this? Do they just not like students leaning on libraries at all, or is it something specific about Boost? I suppose supporting an entire classroom of students trying to install/build the thing across a dozen different operating system versions might be something that a professor would want to avoid, but this is a general problem with most tools, so I don't think it should be such a show stopper... For me, Boost is to C++ as Apache Commons is to Java: literally the first thing I drop in to any project where I'm going to be doing heavy lifting. To some extent, these two mature and highly useful libraries (I guess I should say collections of libraries, really) are the main things the corresponding languages have going for them. C++ without Boost is just an exercise in pain and humiliation, IMHO...
- SeriousGuy 16y ago
  I wish my professor would listen, this is the course i took http://www.ecs.syr.edu/faculty/fawcett/handouts/webpages/CSE687.htm http://www.ecs.syr.edu/faculty/fawcett/handouts/webpages/CSE.... The worst part was that we were supposed to parse C++ code without use of any standard grammar system. even regexp werent allowed. We only got a tokenizer.
  - ewjordan 16y ago
    Yowza, Microsoft all over the place in that course...I weep for the commuter student that runs OS X at home and has no desire (or disk space) to dual boot Windows. That said, the restriction against Boost may be primarily to ensure that people don't rely too much on its features, which would make a lot of those projects almost trivial to solve without actually demonstrating mastery of the underlying concepts. So I suppose it's a worthwhile exercise, but it does bring attention to the main problem with many CS courses, which is that there's never enough emphasis on reusing what other people have already done, whereas when you're programming outside academia, the first thing you should always do is check if someone's already written the code you're about to waste a week on...

ewjordan 16y ago

As someone who learned C++ few years back let me tell you that professors in Universities actively discourage use of Boost. I'm curious - why is this? Do they just not like students leaning on libraries at all, or is it something specific about Boost? I suppose supporting an entire classroom of students trying to install/build the thing across a dozen different operating system versions might be something that a professor would want to avoid, but this is a general problem with most tools, so I don't think it should be such a show stopper... For me, Boost is to C++ as Apache Commons is to Java: literally the first thing I drop in to any project where I'm going to be doing heavy lifting. To some extent, these two mature and highly useful libraries (I guess I should say collections of libraries, really) are the main things the corresponding languages have going for them. C++ without Boost is just an exercise in pain and humiliation, IMHO...

SeriousGuy 16y ago
I wish my professor would listen, this is the course i took http://www.ecs.syr.edu/faculty/fawcett/handouts/webpages/CSE687.htm http://www.ecs.syr.edu/faculty/fawcett/handouts/webpages/CSE.... The worst part was that we were supposed to parse C++ code without use of any standard grammar system. even regexp werent allowed. We only got a tokenizer.
- ewjordan 16y ago
  Yowza, Microsoft all over the place in that course...I weep for the commuter student that runs OS X at home and has no desire (or disk space) to dual boot Windows. That said, the restriction against Boost may be primarily to ensure that people don't rely too much on its features, which would make a lot of those projects almost trivial to solve without actually demonstrating mastery of the underlying concepts. So I suppose it's a worthwhile exercise, but it does bring attention to the main problem with many CS courses, which is that there's never enough emphasis on reusing what other people have already done, whereas when you're programming outside academia, the first thing you should always do is check if someone's already written the code you're about to waste a week on...