March 13, 2006
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LibNAT Release 0.1
I have released LibNAT 0.1 on sourceforge. Here
is a link to the project page. Now that I have something out there for
people to mess with, I can get back to concentrating on school. I have
a project due in one of my classes in a little over a week, so it’s
about time I get that going. We are making a text based adventure game,
or as my professor likes to call it, a medieval simulation. Even though
I find the end result unrewarding (I’ve never liked coding such trivial
programs), it will be nice to finally use some object-oriented design
patterns. One gripe I have about this university is its lack of
teaching more of these design paradigms. I feel I’ve more than made up
for their lack of teaching these things by doing my own personal
projects, but it would be nice to study these ideas in more than just
my spare time.The last project we did was an interesting concept though. The idea was
to get accustom to as much of the STL and its built in algorithms as
possible, so we had to use the STL extensively throughout the project.
By extensive, I mean not having a single explicit loop in the entire
program except for the main loop for retrieving input from the user.
Everything else had to be an algorithm. This was actually to the point
of the STL being annoying, but it really taught us the strengths and
weaknesses of these STL features. Never again will I wonder about the
mystery of functors, binders, and adapters!-Adam
Comments (2)
Congrats on the LibNAT release!
I really wish I’d learned more about software architecture while at school. The curriculum offered classes in it, but it just didn’t seem that appealing compared to computer graphics. If only I’d had the long term perspective – software arch would have been a bit more widely applicable.
Thanks Joel!
It seems that most universities don’t teach students enough about software architecture. One class definately isn’t enough for such a large and complex topic. A lot of time and money could be saved by companies if universities concentrated on the aspects of software architecture starting at the beginning level courses. That would obviously make the courses tougher, but I think students that made it through would be better prepared from the outset.