On Aug 22, 11:12 am, John Bokma <j...@castleamber.com> wrote: > And my > experience is that a formal study in CS can't compare to home study > unless you're really good and have the time and drive to read formal > books written on CS. And my experience is that most self-educaters don't > have that time.
I've read a lot of graduate-level CS books. I think most self-educated programmers have read more of these books than have 4-year degree students who were not required to in order to get their Bachelors degree and who were too busy during college to read anything that wasn't required. > On the other hand: some people I knew during my studies had no problem > at all with introducing countless memory leaks in small programs (and > turning off compiler warnings, because it gave so much noise...) I do this all the time. My slide-rule program, for example, has beau- coup memory leaks. When I have time to mess with the program I clean up these memory leaks, but it is not a big deal. The program just runs, generates the gcode and PostScript, and then it is done. I don't really worry about memory leaks except with programs that are run continuously and have a user-interface, because they can eventually run out of memory. The real problem here is that C, Forth and C++ lack automatic garbage collection. If I have a program in which I have to worry about memory leaks (as described above), I would be better off to ignore C, Forth and C++ and just use a language that supports garbage collection. Why should I waste my time carefully freeing up heap space? I will very likely not find everything but yet have a few memory leaks anyway. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
