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Heron-Centric: Ruminations of a Language Designer
The miseducation of C++ programmers
by Christopher Diggins
August 18, 2005
Summary
Chuck Allison stated in his latest article the unfortunate fact: "C++ novices don't learn templates, let alone CRTP, in their first week". This represents one of the big problems with how C++ is taught to novices.

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Here is the problem: an array IS a template. It should be taught as such. Better yet, skip arrays and go right to std::vector. Novices can grok templates if given a chance. The older generation of C++ educators I find are unfortunately inclined to teach C++ like they learned it. i.e. C first. My students (if anyone was silly enough to give me a course to teach) would never use a raw pointer or a C-style array in their first year.

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About the Blogger

Christopher Diggins is a software developer and freelance writer. Christopher loves programming, but is eternally frustrated by the shortcomings of modern programming languages. As would any reasonable person in his shoes, he decided to quit his day job to write his own ( www.heron-language.com ). Christopher is the co-author of the C++ Cookbook from O'Reilly. Christopher can be reached through his home page at www.cdiggins.com.

This weblog entry is Copyright © 2005 Christopher Diggins. All rights reserved.

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