How to get better help with your programming.

[@rexjuggler19]

Guiding and helping someone with programming is like teaching someone to fish. Great video. I remember back in the 1980's a customer had a 5 MB hard disk. Yes, just 5 MB, but was considered fairly large at the time. They complained that their files that they were making were missing. I tried to diagnose the problem as a malfunction. After going round-and-round for several minutes discussing the problem with them, they finally said "we can't remember what we name them and where we put them!" Before you ask for help, try to distill the nature of your problem down so that you can communicate it. If you are the "helper", be sure to ask the right questions and guide them to how to resolve the problem independently. The person asking for help usually likes that better anyway as they have better understanding and are participating of the resolution instead of being a hapless bystander!

[@anon_y_mousse]

Priceless.

[@anon_y_mousse]

Might be a good idea to do more videos on writing test cases. Perhaps an address book example. Those are super easy to write and follow along with the code, but they're still complex enough, if you write it in C, to cause some problems for newbies.

[@gregvance1586]

Well said. Even those of us who have been coding for years have something to learn from this. Teaching well is deceptively difficult. Jacob, as a C/C++ focused channel, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the recent news about C and C++ being effectively labeled "depreciated" by people at Microsoft in favor of Rust for new code. It seems to be connected to the news about Rust being greenlit for the Linux Kernel. Do you think there's something going on here, or is it all just hype and marketing? Is the value of C/C++ knowledge declining?

[@anon_y_mousse]

Not many that develop for Windows still use C anyhow, and C++ has mostly been relegated to game development these days. There are of course exceptions, but they're called exceptions because they're not the norm. Most Windows developers already use other languages, and there's a lot of C# in use, and increasingly for game development as well. However, there are at least a few decades of life left in both C and C++, and if nowhere else they'll still be used for decades yet on Linux even if Rust does infect the kernel space. C++ may be disgustingly ugly, but they're still adding features that keep it a modern language. Even C is getting feature upgrades, but retaining most of its beauty. As long as I'm alive there will be at least one C developer in the world, and I can just write my own compiler and standard library again if I need to, and I'll try to push people towards it as much as I can. All of that said, I think the worst trend that I've been seeing in the industry the past decade or so is the decline of competency. More companies are hiring people straight out of college who learned how to write in a given language, but not actually how to program. Teachers like Jacob are few and far between these days and most just plain suck. Regardless of which language is taught, people just aren't learning how things work and thus can't write adequate code. It doesn't help that the most used languages run in a VM with tons of safety features that prevent poorly written code from failing early and thus bugs aren't discovered until years later, if at all, probably also after user data is stolen too.

[@casperes0912]

@@anon_y_mousse People straight out of college/university should know how things work, mate. I've written both a compiler and an operating system as part of my bachelor

[@casperes0912]

If nothing else I think it's helpful to learn C because once you understand compilers and C, it's easy to see how C code gets transformed into assembly. Before optimisations at least. Understanding at that level is universally applicable

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@casperes0912 Good, and hopefully that means you had a good teacher, but you would be an exception rather than a rule.

[@vectoralphaSec]

How recent was this news?

[@vatsalnaik15]

Great work as always! Would that be possible to cover some videos related to embedded systems? Like BLE, wi-fi etc. would like to see your approach on those topics. thanks!

[@josechavez9428]

x2.

[@casperes0912]

He already has a lot of embedded systems videos

[@jackgerberuae]

Here is an idea for a video that will help me understand something. Just announced is the Linux kernel developers will accept Rust code on a trial basis. So, the kernel is written exclusively in C, and even C++ is not allowed, as you would obviously know. How do you develop and compile 2 different code sets? Can Rust compile native C? How is the whole setup structured? Thanks

[@leokiller123able]

compiling c code would just be translating it into assembly text code so technically you could even write a c compiler in python

[@jackgerberuae]

@@leokiller123able thanks. I have no real knowledge about how compilers and linkers work

[@sanderbos4243]

Great advice!

[@venkateshramanathan7599]

Whatever this guy said -->100 % True!!!

[@rustycherkas8229]

"...because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know." -- Donald Rumsfeld. Newbies don't know what they don't know... Life's like that...

[@AlexJacksonSmith]

Sounds a lot like my experience as technical support for COBOL programmers... most of the time they have not understood the function in much the same way as I have a problem with C functions! :)

[@leokiller123able]

I have a question that could be a good topic for a video: Is it possible to get the size of a function to copy it in heap then execute it on heap using PROT_EXEC ? (this could be useful for gcc's nested function for example)

[@coderstubechannel]

Jacob this is a really interesting video. Any extra help can improve the quality of our code. You are an inspiration for my channel, thank you very much 🙏

[@benjaminshinar9509]

First step: Take a deep breath and read the error message aloud. Repeat it as many times needed to actually hear it. It's hard, it's scary, sometimes it's fifteen lines of message. But the answer might be there.

[@zxuiji]

On the note of needing help, I'm getting a hanging window in opengl, only when I use the depth buffer bit & only when it reaches the swap buffers call, currently I've tried everything I can think of almost, I'm working on finishing the wrappers that would enable me to create & attach a depth buffer (making general library for cross-platform, cross-distro & cross-app system -flatpak, snaps etc - support), what other things have you or anyone else reading this found cause a hang when swap buffers is called? Just some general stuff is fine, I can lookup the details if my next attempt falls through

[@sanderbos4243]

I can't answer your question unfortunately, and you most likely already thought of this, but it's relevant to the topic of this video: try to make a minimum reproducible example of your problem, or in other words make a copy of your program that has the exact same bug but that contains as few lines of code as possible. This way people can more easily help you out with it in real-life/on a website like StackOverflow. If you just have a small typo somewhere then no matter how detailed your description of the problem is, no-one would be able to point it out to you without an example. :)

[@zxuiji]

@@sanderbos4243 Well I doubt a hang is caused by a typo as that would normally be caught by the compiler, as there isn't even any text related functions (besides the window title which I already confirmed works when the depth bit wasn't in use) I doubt it's a string issue either, instead it's gotta be a setting/binding gone wrong, since I have the actual code posted on relevant forums I didn't bother to go into detail here, I was just fishing for common causes that peops have encountered, I can then just sift through them trying to see if they're in my code, even if none of them are the cause they may still exist in my code so it doesn't hurt me to get general answers rather than pin point answers, I think I used the username zxuiji in the relevant glfw & opengl forums so if you're that interested in the specfic calls you'll get a better look there than what YT permits

[@josechavez9428]

Great!

[@EshmesVid]

"Where do i start?" isnt easily answered by "have you run a debugger"

[@melajod4wan135]

hey i just wanna say that's a great video🙏but u're t-shirt is attractive i can't focus :3

[@germysette6318]

+sub