Chapter 27 // Exercise 16 - Principles & Practice Using C++

In this exercise I'm using Visual Studio 2022 and ISO C11 Standard.

Chapter 27 // Exercise 16

Use macros to obscure (simplify the notation for) the implementation in the previous exercise.

Github: https://github.com/l-paz91/principles-practice/blob/master/Chapter%2027/Exercises/Exercise%2016.c

Of course the final exercise had to be creating some disgusting macros. And with that

I can't believe that was the final exercise. It's been 7 years. I bought this book back in January 2016 with no knowledge of programming (apart from some brief HTML back in '98) and now I've been programming in C++ for 7 years, 4 and half of them professionally; I get paid to make video games, it's crazy.

I'm going to spend a bit of time collecting my thoughts and then come back with a full review of the book. I think my title is going to be "Why you should learn C++ as your first language". I honestly don't think I would've wanted to learn C++ any other way now.

I've been feeling a bit nostalgic lately and going back over books I bought way back in 2016 and 2017 as well as reading my green text on the early exercises of P&P posted on here. I read a chapter 4 post and the memories of that night came flooding back to me. It took me 6 hours to write a function comparing the size of two ints. It was 3am and I was so frustrated I started crying. I developed a fear of bools. Its absolutely hilarious to me now as I sit here reading a random book, silently ripping apart the authors code because they stored an pointer to an enum.

My mantra at work is "git gud". I can relax a bit when I've "gitten gud", then I can "git gudder". I honestly believed I hadn't really changed at all but lately I've started to realise that I can "just do stuff now". 6 years ago I bought Programming Game AI by Example by Mat Buckland. I tried to read it and follow along with the code but it went completely over my head as I had no experience with inheritance and I was convinced OOP was evil (because I didn't want to understand it). Recently, I picked the book back up and not only implemented the code from snippets with no problem but changed it as I was going along, grumbling about the authors use of singletons and lack of interfaces.

2 years ago I read the online book Ray Tracing in one Weekend and attempted to multi-thread it. It was a disaster and no matter how many times I read MSDN or StackOverflow I just couldn't get my attempts to work. Earlier this year I had another go and got a hacky version working in an afternoon. It's not perfect but it worked and I just "knew" how to do it.

3 months after starting as an intern at Rare, I asked a senior in a catch-up "when do you stop feeling like shit?" and his response was "you don't, but over time it won't be as bad". I pressed him for an actual time for "over time" and he just laughed and said "3 years". It's been 4 years since I asked him that.

It took me a very long time to stop feeling like a waitress/receptionist and start thinking of myself as a programmer. 

Thank you Bjarne for giving me the tools to change my life.