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The Hacker's Path

krainboltgreene.heroku.com

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Re: The Hacker's Path

#71

Post by atakan_gurkan »

beambot wrote: post #56
gcr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "fundamentals," strlen means "memory management," "pointers," the gritty stuff. You can't escape memory management by using Ruby and Python, and a rudimentary understanding of pointers are also essential. a = ["Hello", "World"] b = a b[0] = "Goodbye" print a The first time I tried this, I was baffled why ["Goodbye", "World"] showed up. The answer lied in the way this scripting language used pointers, and it wasn't…

Even after using python for many years, I still occasionally make this mistake. It is a tough "bug" to track down. Can anyone comment as to why deep-copy is not the norm?

Simply because it is slow. In the GP's example if a was a much bigger array, copying it over to b would be expensive. On a related note, in C++ for many containers (if not all) in the standard library, copying is the norm; in "The C++ Programming Language" Bjarne Stroustrup warns that it may be slow.

Re: The Hacker's Path

#72

Post by Leynos »

burgerbrain wrote: post #43
krainboltgreene wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're allowed to say that. In the mean time, I'd rather not have my students struggle with verbose syntax.

At what academic level are these students? Every university^ I know of teaches incoming students in a language with C style syntax and they handle it just fine. ^Except those which use scheme...

University of Edinburgh uses Haskell. (Although it was C when I studies there).

Re: The Hacker's Path

#74

Post by tritogeneia »

Learning on your own != learning as a college CS student, it seems. I'd be curious to compare and contrast "Hacker's Paths" for students versus people trying to squeeze in a few hours a day. (My intuition is that the theory-first approach makes more sense for students than for the self-taught.)

Re: The Hacker's Path

#75

Post by kahawe »

Honestly, Why does everyone and their brother STILL recommend Kernighan & Ritchie in all those "Getting Started" articles in this day and age?

I am not trying to diminish the significance of their work in any way shape or form but first we should learn Ruby and Python and THEN "C Programming Language" to "get paid"...?

Why not recommend diving into modern C++ and some of the absolutely fantastic libraries out there (Boost etc..) or more modern books on C instead? I am sure this would get you much further and keep you up to speed with current advancements since a hell of a lot has changed, even newer standards in C, since 1988. (referring to 2nd edition)

And while good intentions were surely behind it, it really went downhill here: "Drinking Heavily" and "Teh Womenz"

You do not NEED to become an alcoholic or fsck "teh womenz" to be or work as a successful "hacker". You do absolutely need soft skills, friends, some networking and you NEED to socialize and yes, a partner (or partners) can be a wonderful thing in your life and booze does work wonders as a social "lubricant" but these are far from being the only forms of social interaction or positive recreational activities you should invest your time in and, quite frankly, we tend to overrate getting hammer and getting laid.

Re: The Hacker's Path

#76

Post by lloeki »

rednum wrote: post #5

There are some problems with rendering this text in Chromium - words around some of the punctuation overlap. Also, I think that ESR's guide is much more informative: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html The OP omits some of the points I consider important - problem-solving attitude, low level programming, learning unix. Also I think that starting with both Python and Ruby is a bit strange idea - they are r…

"starting with both Python and Ruby is a bit strange idea"

This suggestion is precisely interesting, because while we might consider them close they solve problems differently in many cases. The one hacker lesson to learn of this (besides the fact that programming can be enjoyable by gazillion orders of magnitudes than with "corporate" languages) is that while bad solutions do exist, there might also be competing but perfectly valid solutions and that one being good does not mean that everything else is bad.

Re: The Hacker's Path

#77

Post by xyzzyz »

burgerbrain wrote: post #43
krainboltgreene wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're allowed to say that. In the mean time, I'd rather not have my students struggle with verbose syntax.

At what academic level are these students? Every university^ I know of teaches incoming students in a language with C style syntax and they handle it just fine. ^Except those which use scheme...

University of Warsaw lets students choose either Pascal or OCaml for introductory classes.
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