CppCon 2017: Bjarne Stroustrup “Learning and Teaching Modern C++”

—
—
We – attendees at CppCon – are all teachers. Some teach for a living; many occasionally teach a course or give a lecture; essentially all give advice about how to learn C++ or how to use C++. The communities we address are incredibly diverse.

What do we teach, and why? Who do we teach, and how? What is “modern C++”? How do we avoid pushing our own mistakes onto innocent learners?

Teaching C++ implies a view of what C++ is; there is no value-neutral teaching. What teaching tools and support do we need? Consider libraries, compiler support, and tools for learners. This talk asks a lot of questions and offers a few answers. Its aim is to start a discussion, so the Q&A will be relatively long.
—
Bjarne Stroustrup - Managing Director,, Morgan Stanley
C++: history, design, use, standardization, future; performance, reliability; software developer education; | distributed systems
—

*-----*
*-----*

[claudiotheobaldo]

Egoless teaching is so important! I love the fact that he touched on it!

[Gustavo-okjw]

"One of the problems with education, by the way, is that the previous occupation of most professors was student, and that, I don't think is just the right background for teaching people how to do". Finally someone to back me up.

[morrisonbrett]

I can listen to him talk all day! Great presentation.

[danieldixon]

Thanks Bjarne for this video. Even at age 62 I still find myself as a Student. I am old C programmer and I found myself stuck on a problem and your advice on this video helped me guide in solving a coding problem. It does help to review the programming tools you use. Thanks again.

[BogdanSerban]

I started learning programming in high school, but it was always simple maths or sorting algorhytms. At the university I started learning PRACTICAL programming on microcontrollers, databases or GUIs, and only then I got an understanding of how everything works.
You have to have a purpose, otherwise it's useless and you'll probably forget everything anyway.

[DanielFBest]

This man is so knowledgeable, and I could listen for hours.

[akioasakura]

1000% greatest of all time. Pure REAL humbleness and passion. If only more ppl were like him society would be much better. And man why is nobody laughing at his jokes 🙁🙁 he’s so funny, good jokes without being annoying and straight to the point😂😂Thank u for sharing!!

[kuhluhOG]

1:29:00 I as someone how programs now for just over a year, can approve of this.
At school, we don't do pointers or anything decently close to the hardware, which results that my classmates have a hard time getting arrays, classes etc. I taught myself basic (and with basics I mean just the basics) of C and a bit of C++, resulting in understanding other things actually quite quickly. Also, when we did arrays (after about 2 weeks of doing them some still didn't get it) I explained them what a pointer is and how things are saved in RAM (and what references are)...afterwards they understood it and all of that took about 30min...


Please, to all teachers, don't start with object-orientated programming (which includes Java in general), if your students have never written even one line of code. They will just go and ask "What does public mean?", "What does class mean?", ... and because they are at a state where they don't even know what "if" means, they will just have either an information overload, or think of you (as a person) poorly (the latter is probably the worst which could happen btw, especially my generation will just make a fool out of you in such cases like this, but in a way you can barely punish them for it).

Just start procedural (C is actually a good choice because you can teach them basic abstractions, if you write an own library you can also do VBA in for example Excel (drawing lines up and down, left and right to be exact).
But for your students sake don't start object-orientated, most either will look stuff, where you say "You don't need to know that for now.", up anyway after class (and have a information overload) or drop out after some times (mostly because they are fed up with it, they don't want to feel treated like a child).

[regal_]

His accent and calm & expressive presentation made it really easy to concentrate for 1 1/2 hours. Contrary to my uni lectures where I doze off after 15 minutes

[ackz]

let's hope for the bright future of C++

[porky]

I got inspired to use C++ again instead of rust.

[viraatchandra]

I started a club which uses the Raspberry Pi platform to teach coding to my peers in school after listening to this talk.

[amolaspatas]

Enlightening way beyond the technical scope of the presentation.

[Engoneer]

I'm teaching 7 of my friends and this is exactly what I have been looking for. I've been trying to teach through the experience of fun stuff rather than nitpick stuff

[leesoo-ahn]

I swear all programmers must watch his speeches, also this video too. He knows the wrong of all the books and lectures that teach only syntax. That's why half of students who majoring in CSE know syntax, but had problem on programming, at least in my country.

[BbB-vruh]

The cpp I learned in school, and that I used in my first job, was largely on the cpp98 standard. Even though I started college 2015 lol. This introduced me to a lot of nice, new features of the language.

[michaelpowell]

1:29:30 Couldn't agree more. The fundamentals are of CRITICAL importance; if, as Mr. Stroustrup said, for nothing more than to appreciate, we do not necessarily need to be make those mistakes all over again.

[praveen]

There is a new series coming from CrashToSmash Modern C++ . Hope that covers latest features

[porky]

In school we used java for programming, and we never touched stuff of the standard library. Instead we spent most of the time to learn about and implement linked list and other similar data structures in an inefficient, object oriented, non-generic style based on inheritance.

[michaelpowell]

55:44 Yes, INDEED! In fact, not only have I cast the PERIOD, but also at times the REPRESENTATION! ABSOLUTELY!