Over RIT's Intersession, a break from classes lasting almost the entire month of January, I went back to my old High School to help mentor their FIRST Robotics Team. When I was on the team I was the lead of their programming sub-team, so coming back it was a no-brainer what I would be asked to help out on. In previous years the team had used Java to program the robot, it was simple enough that new team members would be able to pick it up in the few months we has before the actual build season started. But this year I came back to the surprise that the new lead of Programming had switched the coding language of choice to C++.
I love C++ it's a great language it it does a lot of things in a way that makes sense to me, personally I wish that people took the effort to port more things to D, but that's a story for another blog post. I just don't feel that C++ is a good language for beginner programmers, especially those who's idea of writing a program is: Tracking a Killers Address in a Visual Basic Program.
When I went back to visit the team I got the questions that would be expected of most beginners learning C++. "Can you explain pointers?" "Why do I need to delete variables?" "Is real programming really this hard?" I tried my best to help recover the students so they wouldn't fall to the trap of thinking that C++ is a language that isn't worth the effort it takes to learn.
Most of all my experience going back to mentor the team reminded me how much I loved Engineering and Electronics. One thing I want to make time to do in my schedule among the cloud of software projects that I created is to work on a small electronics project. After all it's why I got my RaspberryPi last year.