What am I working on???

As stated early this year I am now a student developer at Steinwurf, which is awesome and I am challenged every day and expanding my knowledge of RLNC, C++ and C, which interest me a lot.

But what do I do besides my work? 

NOTHING... HAHAH kidding. So what has actually happened, since last? Well not much on my personal projects I am afraid, the Terminal books has been slowly developed the reason for this is I do not has as much spare time as I am use to, and I have started spending more time on fiction writing (ooh yes). But the Terminal book is still in development and after the 19th of december it will get a lot of focus I hope. 

DynStr: 

Has been discontinued, the reason for this is simple. The people whom use it likes it (which I am happy about), but they have realised the world must go on, and by such has adapted to use memset and so on themself. 

Fiction writing

As some know, I once would have liked to be an author instead of a computer programmer. But what few actually know is, that it is still a dream of mine, though I am bit dyslexic. Therefor I have started working on small fantasy fiction book series, about one of my favourite subjects, which is religion. 

A small teaser about the content seems in order: 

The story is based in current times, and is concerning the ancient war between good and evil. More precise the battle between heaven and hell, and how perhaps the human perspective on this war is wrong. 

More I will not tell at the moment, but I hope some will be able to enjoy it some day :) 

- Lars 

 

Arduino - WHY?

Okay it is rare that I rant about a product which is not Windows, but I would like to do so now.
I have just had to help a friend of mine working with a Arduino board for an exercises, and my problem is not the board itself. But rather the implementation of the C language which it utilise, what I hate is:

• Special functions
• Automatic include 

Special functions

But Lars how can you hate them, they are awesome, I love Serial.println? No you do not, not in two years when you have to code proper C, you will hate it and you will hate it good. These special functions, which comes as implementations of standard C library functions are just plain stupid, let the student use printf and so on, and get to know special things such as '\n'. It is not fair towards the students, to teach them to be lazy and not understand the programming language properly. 

Automatic include

TO THE CREATE OF THE ARDUINO C LANGUAGE: May you burn in what ever hell you believe in, for this monstrosity. 

But Lars it just makes C so much more accessible, if that is your opinion fine. But for the future generation of programmers, I hope you never will be a teacher. It is even worse than special functions. Auto include of libraries such as stdlib og stdio, is madness I started learning Java that way, and I have always cursed my teacher for that. You hide a very important thing of programming away from your students WHY, give me one good reason and to make it easy is not one. Later on when they have to learn proper coding, they would think well this is stupid. Instead of cherish the fact, that they have more or almost absolute control of what is actually in the application they build and ship. 

Of course the functions for setting pins high and so on is okay, but in extension of the above written, show the students that they need a library to do this. 

Conclusion

My initial thoughts of the Arduino platform is; that it is a fun and engaging way to teach your students how to program. But this is totally overshadowed by the two subjects mentioned above, if those are removed from the Arduino it would be a fantastic tool. Until then however, I can not recommend it to newcomers in programming. 

Sorry Arduino people :( 

- Lars