[Episode 1]

Public Humiliation: C++

The frustrating journey of learning C++ in 2014

There are hundreds of resources to learn any new fancy programming language around. Who would think that learning C++ in 2014 would result in such a catastrophe? Join me in the frustrating journey of failure misery and self-loathing.

Nowadays coding and testing are not a difficult tasks, most of the popular programming languages we use everyday are simple text files that you execute with a command and you get the thing running.

While following an incredible simple yet explanatory tutorial, they were telling me to use the command cpp for building, and this was the only output I got:

After panicking, and googling obsessively about the error I could not find a single solution or explanation to the output. This meant that I needed some desperate Stackoverflow help.

After posting the question, 4 instant down-votes and no answer to the problem; I had no clue. Feeling hopeless again failing to get a “Hello world!” to the screen. Lucky me, someone suggested that I might be using the wrong compiler to build the program and, instead of cpp, I should use g++ (Gnu C++ compiler).

It seems that cpp stands for C Pre-Processor. The infinite scrolling mess above is the preprocessed version of my program, and the source code of the iostream recursively added after the header of the file.

So, I’m not sure how the lady of the tutorial is able to build it and run it with no problems, but after using the right command, I managed to continue following the rest of it. I just hope this doesn’t start a butterfly effect of differences between the tutorial and me.

I’ve learnt a golden rule; be sceptical about tutorials.