[bstrong]

Oh, memories. I took CS107 in 1996, which was apparently the date this handout was written. Nick was my academic advisor, and his CS108 (which was C++ at the time) was one of my favorite courses of all time. Bunny World...

Maybe I'm just a grumpy old programmer, but I feel like kids these days are missing out on something important by learning to program in a language that doesn't require them to truly grok memory management.

[agnivade]

Most often, in general purpose programming, you don't need burden of managing memory manually. Things just go fine with a good runtime.

And that is what I think beginners should be introduced to - how to write code, how to frame algorithms in your mind and convert them into lucid code. Python does all of this wonderfully. It hides all of the internal details and exposes just the part that is needed for sometime writing a computer program for the first time in their life - simple statements which do simple things.

There is no need for a beginner to understand memory management at all. Trying to understand what is code or how algorithms work is more important to build that mental capacity IMO. Pardon me, but it does seem that just because you had to undergo the pain of trying to understand pointers, memory layout and allocations, you want everyone to go through the same experience as well.

[sitkack]

Show me a Haskell programmer who doesn't understand memory management. You are grumpy, and I am older, but all memory is managed.

I recently ran into someone that was teaching a Python boot camp and they were forcing the students to use VIM instead of PyCharm, and in their words, "using a text editor requires them to memorize apis".

They didn't know about type inference, rename, extract method or navigate to declaration. I view it as the same bias, the attitude doesn't encourage people to use the best tools for the job because we suffered in the past. How about we go back in time and teach young selves how to write code than actually use 2TB of main memory and 128 cores using a dev environment that can scale to millions of lines of code.

[d-crane]

As an undergraduate senior in the CS program at the University of Washington, I can definitely attest to memory management giving the majority of people a really hard time in our required C course. I've only talked to one other person in my cohort that likes programming in C, and unsurprisingly they don't have any trouble with the finer points of it at all.

[khedoros1]

Most of my classes were taught in Java, but I took care to also learn and do a lot of work in C++. I've also played around with disassembling various binaries (especially code actually written in assembly, like DOS games). Teaching myself to manually track the state of the stack, and see how it was used in function calls, was eye-opening in a way similar to learning manual memory management.

[ryanatallah]

I actually took CS107 in 2012 with Jerry Cain, and we still used this handout as a reference guide.