The Student's Sorrows: C

Welcome to the first edition of The Student's Sorrows, where I lament over everything I find to be just plain intolerable.

I hate C and all who push it upon me. I don't want to know C, but it's a requirement for the CS major at my school. I like Java. I like knowing when, where, and why errors occur in my code. "Segmentation Fault", "Memory clobbered before allocated block", "Bus error" - these are not helpful to me. Sure, I could use gdb and step through every line until I find an error, but that's just not effective when I've got a pointer set one less than it should be, 200 lines before anything goes wrong. Ugh, pointers. Listen, kids: never get involved with pointers. They're just bad people.

Also, I love creating and declaring objects. I like being able to call methods on those objects. I love everything about object-oriented programming. Structs and unions just don't... do it for me.

Of course, this hatred of procedural languages has a lot to do with my CS teachers being insolent puppy-kicking bastards. All our C projects were horrible. We had arbitrary deadlines and constantly changing (not to mention overly verbose) project descriptions, a testing server which wasn't fully compatible with the development servers, tests which weren't available until a few days before the due date, and only one good TA.

Not a good experience.