In reply to a post by 12eason:

In reply to a post by lt567:

In regards to the progress this is the 9th week of C++ so I would class myself as a beginner currently.

they are teaching you c++ as a first language? that sucks. good luck.

I'd agree with this regarding the suck bit.

seems a good choice of first language - you learn everything about pointers etc., then you can really appreciate languages like Java/C# and what you don't have to do

it could be worse though - they could be teaching C++ on MFC

In reply to a post by AnotherExPipex:

Ideally, as it's a C++ course, you'll use classes and inheritance for your solution

Only when it makes the code easier to understand!

I think there's a little more to OO than making the code easy to understand (some might argue that it does the opposite). Ease of maintenance and the ease with which new features can be added (plus protection of data) are more important IMO.

I'd say C++ is a very fine language to learn programming, particularly when well taught. It can be as simple or as complicated as you like, and it has very good OO features. I'm struggling to think of a better one - possibly Pascal for really basic stuff, but it's not very useful in the modern day and there's no real standard for OO in Pascal.

Actually I'd probably choose Smalltalk, but I suspect many would disagree with me. Objective C and Eiffel are also good, but very non-mainstream.

In reply to a post by AnotherExPipex:

I think there's a little more to OO than making the code easy to understand (some might argue that it does the opposite). Ease of maintenance and the ease with which new features can be added (plus protection of data) are more important IMO.

And those of us who maintain code would argue - over using/badly designed OO makes the code slower, less reliable, more obtuse and hard to maintain

properly applied OO - does the resverse, so I would argue if OO makes your code harder to understand (once you understand OO) you are doing it wrong!

over using/badly designed OO makes the code slower, less reliable, more obtuse and hard to maintain

I'd say that's true of any programming language. The Obfuscated C contest comes to mind.

it does - but there seems to be something about inheritance (or any new technique they discover) that coders seem to think they must use it as much as possible whether it helps or not

in the problem mentioned - a couple of functions could solve it quite elegantly, now I'd wrap those up into an object as they would be part of a bigger problem

I'd say some thing like Java or C# would be best learning languages now - but lack of teaching pointers and memory issues may be a downside

Outside education - the only major OO Pascal choice is Delphi and when only one choice no need of standards - but that has unfortunately become rather dead in the water

C# has pointers. You're discouraged from using them and they're classified as "unsafe" I believe, but they're there none the less.