Re: sh?tpile of errors

Bill Cunningham said:


"Richard Heathfield" <rjh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2rWdnTCk7JV1bgnVnZ2dnUVZ8sednZ2d@xxxxxxxxx
Mark Pappin gave you a great chance to rationalise your learning process
and gain a good teacher at the same time, but you threw that chance
away.

Maybe he's right from a point of view. Richard I don't think the
tutorial from Mark as well meant as it was was a good idea.

I don't think he was offering you a tutorial. To use a swimming analogy, he
was offering you a lifeline, but it seems that you don't want to grasp it;
you'd rather thrash about, yelling "help" as loud as you can while at the
same time seeing how far out to sea you can get and how powerful a current
you can find.

Not for him or me.

Certainly not for him. Nobody has that much spare time.

I'm suprised we made it to question 4. I sometimes need to be
almost fed by the spoonful on this stuff.

Spoon-feeding is for babies, not for programmers. There is no mental
activity regularly undertaken by large numbers of people that is quite so
difficult as programming. Even lousy programmers have to be pretty bright,
and those who - maybe through no fault of their own - have major
difficulties with learning new things are going to find programming
impossible, because there is so much to learn *and retain*.

Maybe hard learning group debugging and k&r2 is the way for me.

I disagree. If you have to rely on others to do your debugging for you,
you're not actually learning *anything*. In any case, you haven't reached
the debugging stage yet. You're still at the "it won't compile" stage, and
you can't even balance parentheses. At your current rate of progress, I
shudder to think how long it will take before you can routinely write
moderate amounts of code without troubling the compiler's diagnostic
subsystem.

Then I will eventually learn C.

I doubt it. Life is not a story-book. Determination is necessary, but
insufficient on its own. You need other qualities to achieve your goals,
and if you want to learn C one of the other qualities you need is mental
discipline, which you appear to lack in bucketfuls.

I
really don't think Mark had the patience needed for one like me. What I
need is an "LD" teacher.

Then I suggest you find one. But you are unlikely to find one here.

Anyway from now on I would only like to ask for debugging advice when
necessary a little learning and for the most part we can go our ways.

If you ignore what you are told, why should anyone bother to tell you
anything?

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
.

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