About programing, a general question

[Patrick Kobly]

On 12/17/2010 5:14 AM, Parshwa Murdia wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 4:28 PM, Toxico Nimbus <ToxN at free.fr 
> <mailto:ToxN at free.fr>> wrote:
>
>     - Don't use something you couldn't create yourself
>     Toxico Nimbus
>
>
>
> How you imagine could a beginner create something which he is trying 
> to learn? Could you do that by the time you started learning?
>
I suspect Toxico is speaking about a particular challenge that has come 
up with educators teaching particularly OO languages as first 
languages.  Specifically, because of the strong encapsulation and data 
hiding techniques present in these languages, a wide ecosystem of 
reusable class libraries has surrounded them - to the point where 
programming in these languages is often seen as an integration effort - 
trying to integrate a series of class libraries.  As a result, a certain 
segment of the programming community has lost understanding of huge 
swaths of the practice - particularly foundational algorithms - such as 
searching and sorting algs - because learning programmers just use 
rather than implement.

When you are reusing code (like a sorting or search algorithm, or a hash 
tree class in Java), think about whether you understand (at least in 
basic terms) how that code is likely implemented.  If you were given the 
task of implementing a hash table (because java.util.HashMap was 
unavailable to you), would you be able to?  Would you know where to 
start?  Would you be able to describe the performance characteristics of 
a search, insert or delete using this structure?  These are important 
questions that you should learn to answer...

PK

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