Thursday, August 26, 2010

Recent activity: Google DevQuiz and why you probably shouldn't use Visual C++

 Google Developer Day Tokyo is on end of September.

 After previous years where signup was first come first served, this year they're filtering people by using a "developer quiz". Seems a reasonable enough move to make. I've noticed a few people who are interested in going just for the prospect of a chance at a "free phone" since there is some speculation they'll be giving away an android handset again this year(If I'm not mistaken they already gave them out at this years I/O).

 Despite starting early, and getting the first half done well before the deadline, I got distracted by other things for a while and ended up doing the remaining half in the last day. Got all my solutions in, and at least according to the automated grader I cleared all the problems successfully. I can only hope that I don't lose  points for bad code or something(because my "test of concept" prototype ended up getting hacked into my final solution...). I'll probably throw up some of the code here later with light commentary.

 Unfortunately I lost a fair bit of time to poor problem comprehension as they were stated only in Japanese. I'm quite comfortable with it, but considering there's a reasonable amount of English speakers participating, it would have been nice to have English version of the questions.

 Since I was doing my work on a pc I don't normally use for development, I thought I'd give Visual C++ a go for old times sake(when I was doing a lot of DirectX/Win32 programming at university)... See how it was now.

 Unfortunately I was rather disappointed. While IDE's like eclipse have come ahead leaps and bounds, Visual C++(or at least the express edition) is slow and clumsy. Often for apparently no good reason it would just slow down, and syntax checking and highlighting is terribly buggy. While it is the express edition with a cut-down feature set, I don't think that "adding bugs" is the same as feature cuts. I used to have a lot of appreciation for Visual Studio as one of the better Microsoft products, but right now it does little to please and much to annoy.

 On a final note, I recently picked up "Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition". I've only just gotten started on it, but it's a real trip to the past. The old school(pre-ANSI) C is a real shocker, and having to learn PDP-11 assembly is a bit of an irritation, but what I've read so far has been interesting and educating.

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