Language Comparison

Tag: Language Comparison

Alas, Concepts, We Hardly Knew Ye

22 July 2009 by Tyler McHenry·0 Comments

While catching up on recent postings to Lambda the Ultimate, I was rather surprised to discover that last week concepts were, by a vote of the committee members, completely removed from the C++0x draft specification.

On Monday, July 13th 2009 Concepts were dramatically voted out of C++0x during the C++ standards committee meeting in Frankfurt. […] When I first heard the news, I couldn’t believe it. Concepts were supposed to be the most important addition to core C++ since 1998. Tremendous efforts and discussions were dedicated to Concepts in every committee meeting during the past five years. After dozens of official papers, tutorials and articles — all of which were dedicated to presenting and evangelizing Concepts — it seemed very unlikely that just before the finishing line, Concepts would be dropped in a dramatic voting.

C++0x is the next version of the C++ language standard. It should more properly be called C++1x, since the chances of it being released within the year are like the chances that Microsoft would contribute code to the Linux kernel — er, bad example. Anyway, the point is that it’s not going to be done this year.

While I’ve been following the development of C++0x with interest, I haven’t been immersing myself in the implementation details. In essence, I want to know what’s coming up, but I’m not too interested in committing to memory the nuts and bolts of a specification that is likely to be revised several more times before it is finalized. I’m not totally abstaining from C++0x until it’s done. I do use some features where they are useful and already implemented, for example I am using unordered_map, the standard library’s version of a hash table, in the latest iteration of my work on the lottery problem. However, my understanding of the majority of C++0x features has been relatively, for lack of a better word, “conceptual”.

The layman’s understanding that I had of the C++0x concepts feature led me to react with shock to learning of it’s removal. It sounded incredibly useful, and I didn’t see what could be such a big problem that it would have to be ripped out entirely. That changed when I read more about concepts as they (were going to) exist in C++0x.

I’ll Tell You When You’re Older

10 June 2009 by Tyler McHenry·1 Comment

I’d like to address something that I’ll call the “I’ll tell you when you’re older” phenomenon in computer science education. This mostly has to do with programming, but there are also situations in theory education where this happens as well. Specifically here I’m going to discuss how it can affect the choice of a teaching language.

As is often the case with something so complex and with such a storied history, programming languages have quirks, gotchas, and many layers of operation. Therefore, it turns out to be extremely tempting when introducing an aspiring programmer to his or her first computer language to try as much as possible to avoid confusing the student by eliding material that isn’t relevant to the lesson at hand. Essentially, this means deflecting tangential questions, or anticipated questions, with the educational equivalent of the commonly experienced childhood situation where your parent promises to explain to you what some mature or risque term means “when you’re older.” In this sense, the instructor is requiring the student to wait until a later point in the course before explaining the meaning of a particular concept or construct.

In the abstract, this seems to be an advisable thing to do, but (though I certainly haven’t done formal study to back up this assertion) I suspect that it encourages the dreaded practice known as cargo-cult programming. Cargo-cult programming is the software engineering manifestation of an appeal to authority. It entails the use of patterns or code fragments when one does not really understand what they do or why they are being used, simply because one has been instructed to use them, or has seen an instructor silently do so.

It is my belief that a programmer, be he a student or a professional, should never, ever write a line of code without understanding what it does or why they wrote it. This maxim is fundamentally incompatible with the “I’ll tell you when you’re older” educational tactic because that tactic necessarily entails that the student use something without having understood it. So this tactic should be avoided whenever possible, and it should absolutely be avoided in a student’s very first lesson.