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Why teach it when it seems like less than 10% of postings are looking for it? And we're back to the discussion of what is the point of a University CS educatio
by dagw 1y ago
Why teach it when it seems like less than 10% of postings are looking for it?
And we're back to the discussion of what is the point of a University CS education. I would argue that learning something like C++ is important for the same reason something like Lisp or Haskell is important. Not because it will necessarily help you get a job, but because it introduces you to new concepts and a new way of thinking about programming and computation that will be useful no matter what language you end up programming in for a living.
- giantg2 1y agoI don't think there are any main concepts that I learned in C++ that weren't also covered in other courses, such as Java, assembly, and COBOL. If we're going to teach different types of languages then they should be truly different, such as the ones just mentioned.
- dagw 1y agoOf course you can teach most concepts in most languages, but when it comes to understanding concepts like stack vs heap, pointers to a value vs the value itself, move vs copy semantics, pass by reference vs pass by value, explicit vs implicit memory allocation and deallocation, and so on, I found C++ pretty useful.
- giantg2 1y agoSure, and those are pretty much all things you learn in assembly with the added benefit of understanding the structure (registers).
- sys_64738 1y agoUniversity isn't there to teach any languages. But it is there to provide the foundation and theory. If somebody wants practical C++ then go to a further education college.