Title: From the Coalface

A friend approached me with a sudden desire to learn C++ in one week. It was for a job interview. She didn't know anything about programming, and she wanted to pick it up in such a short time so that she could say she had the skills when she went for the interview.

I explained to her that it would be much better to learn Python in such a short time. I showed her the Python website (www.python.org) and we looked through their tutorials to decide which one was best for her. Installing Python was out of the question, since she did not own a computer and we had to use the library computers (which don't let you install anything).

Fortunately, though, they had some machines running Mac OS X, which has various command-line programming tools as standard, including Python and Emacs. It took me a while to persuade my friend to use Mac OS instead of Windows, and there were some teething troubles, but in the end she was able to go into the Terminal and write simple programs using Python and Emacs. I left her working through the exercises in the tutorial.

Later she called me and asked me to explain format strings and padding, which I did (while thinking that perhaps I could have picked a better tutorial), and then asked if I could write and explain a quick simulation program (it didn't take long in Python to write a simple monte-carlo queuing simulation). Meanwhile she had somehow found herself an old copy of Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" and asked me to show her how to invoke a C++ compiler. "Oh dear", I thought, "now she will need a lot more help".

Needless to say, her first C++ program would never compile. She'd apparently got C++ muddled up not only with Python but also with higherorder logic (she had a slightly mathematical background) and the result was an "interesting" programming language but it wasn't C++. She'd tried to define a factorial function by writing something like this:

#include <iostream>
1! = 1;
for(n = 2; n < 10; n++)
n! = n * n-1!;
cout << 10!

I gently explained what was wrong, gradually put the code right and compiled it, only to find that this Macintosh was somehow missing the C++ streams library (it must have been a mistake made by their remote system administration software).

"Stick to Python", I wanted to say, but no, she was determined to work through the exercises even without trying her code on a compiler. As I was quite busy, I left her to it, but not before showing her ACCU.

I don't know what happened since then. I suppose she must have lost interest after the interview.