[Bahamut]

I've actually been down this route when I was a kid experimenting with making programs. I did not understand what was the point of functions - why not just copy/paste blocks of logic?

It wasn't something important to me for a long time since I did other stuff instead, but coming back to programming in an effort to make a career out of it, a lot of that stuff became instantly obvious & I felt foolish for not recognizing it in the first place.

[einhverfr]

> It wasn't something important to me for a long time since I did other stuff instead, but coming back to programming in an effort to make a career out of it, a lot of that stuff became instantly obvious & I felt foolish for not recognizing it in the first place.

I think one of the key things experienced programmers finally get is that we never stop understanding that there are things which we are doing sub-optimally and can continue to be reflective and self-critical of that. How can I structure my code better? How can I solve this software development problem that seems to come up frequently?

And then as we solve them, the solutions seem so obvious we wonder why we didn't realize it sooner.

[poopicus]

It's funny, as a kid I can remember thinking: "Right, everything has to go in the main function unless absolutely necessary, it will just be easier to read that way."

Nowadays, it's the exact opposite!

[daigoba66]

As a kid I wrote a few games using QBasic. I apparently didn't have a firm grasp on control flow because every call to a sub routine ended with a call to another subroutine; sometimes to a sub routine that was already called earlier in the stack. You win the game by beating it before crashing with a stack overflow.

[Sammi]

Nah you just invented continuation passing style. You just needed tail recursion too, and you would be good to go ;)

[doktrin]

My code changed in a similar way, however I recently devolved.

I've mostly worked with higher level languages, and recently delved back into C. I had forgotten what a complete pain in the ass it is to pass complex data structures around between functions.

I'm a bit ashamed to admit my functions got pretty damn beefy real quick.

[marvin]

Don't worry, you can do this in C# or Python as well. Just structure your small, gradually growing proof-of-concept and soon-to-be-finished-product program correctly. No classes! Or at the very least a few monolithic ones, which cannot be instantiated. Use static methods whenever possible. I have never ever ever done this.

(I am getting ready to write an essay titled "Confessions of a Shitty Programmer").

[lstamour]

Try C++, join the dark side! In addition to chocolate chip cookies, we promise C++11 move semantics for returned objects/values. The cookies/cake might be a lie. :-)

[krapp]

I had to create a small ADO class for advanced C++ last year.

It was... terrifying.

[Nursie]

&structure ... ?

[doktrin]

> &structure

AFAIK, that's only a legal function signature in C++.

To the point of the question : when I wrote that, I was specifically thinking of 2-dimensional arrays, not structs per se.

[Nursie]

I meant passing a pointer rather than a by-ref call (which is indeed C++ only).

i.e. void myfunc(thing* stuff) { return; }

int main() { thing stuff; myfunc(&stuff); }

[doktrin]

Oh, totally agreed. What I had difficulty with, specifically, was passing around a struct that contained a multidimensional array of a size determined at runtime.

I'm sure the problems I had could be solved by either a full re-design (not really an option), or accomplished by someone with more C experience.

[runiq]

This sounds like the mammoth version of "sleeping on it", which has worked remarkably well for me.