Blog #12

Your blog entry must explicitly answer the following questions about the class (mark the questions in bold in your post):

• What are you most proud of doing last week?

I implemented the networked game required for my Game Tech class. Also, I was first to finish the Shapes1 exercise on Monday and the Shapes2 exercise on Friday.

• What ability or skill did you use to make that moment the most proud of?

I used a bunch of abilities/skills: my C++ programming skill, my ability to remember ideas and details from tutorials and videos, my work ethic, and time management.

• What impact did what you do have on other people?

I helped other students with the Shapes1 exercise on Monday, including Zeeshan, who likes to be mentioned in other people’s blog posts. Then I helped more students with the Shapes2 exercise on Friday, including Zeeshan again, who is probably sick of being mentioned by now.

• What did you think of Paper #12. Why extends is evil.

I’m not a big fan of titles like “language feature is evil”, because “evil” implies malicious intent, and I’ve never seen a language feature that I believe was introduced maliciously. I do believe that implementation inheritance is often a symptom of bad design. It is an unfortunate failing of C++ that it doesn’t have syntax specifically for Java-style interfaces. Instead we have to look over the entire class declaration or rely on documentation to understand when an abstract class represents what would in Java just be a declared interface.

• What did you think of exercise 9. Shapes1.

I had no trouble with it, because I have written a lot of C++. I think it was unfair to most students, because it required us to know the syntax for base class initialization, and to understand that we need to upcast to base class references, and the lecture didn’t cover either of those things. I helped several other students with these issues.

• What did you think of exercise 10. Shapes2.

It was not difficult for me.

The method area should be a pure virtual method, making Shape an abstract class, but we haven’t covered those concepts in class yet.

• What did you think of method overriding, virtual, and dynamic_cast?

They’re useful features.

• What made you happy this week?

Did you know UT has a high school? It’s true! My daughter is taking Algebra 1 online from UTHS and scored 95 on her first midterm.

• What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

This week’s tip comes from Kevin Kelly, the first executive editor of Wired Magazine:

Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Hang out with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.

See you next week!