Show HN: A simple GUI Notepad using C++ natively made in my high school in 2015

It was something you could drop into your app and it had an API for all sorts of nice features. It was one of the best controls at the time for creating a text editor.

I think I would immediately know the name if it were mentioned. It was much faster and better than anything at the time when it came out.

It was taught in Turbo C++, Syllabus was very basic ones which has basic i/o, file stream, loops, etc.

So at that time, wanted to explore something out of box, and for the 12th Grade Project, School did restrict to only Turbo C++ at that time, so the thing which was most possible solution was to hack around with that and having a mouse pointer and a GUI was a pinnacle moment at that time when the resources was limited.

But now School's Board of Examination (CBSE) did change syllabus to Python did move to Python scraping C++.

C++ is not the language I'd use to get many people attracted, but if that is the only language the teacher is able to teach, it's better than nothing.

I agree it's unfortunate that schools are/were slow in catching up to a modern programming environment. This highschooler's project was made in 2015, so the students were learning a language standard/platform that was a couple decades behind.

It makes the project even more impressive, given the technical constraints that the student had to work with, in addition to their young age.

It's a good example of the "hacker" spirit that we encourage on HN. Software (and hardware I imagine) engineers deal with similar situations often, having to work around the limitations of legacy codebases or platforms, challenging what it can be made to do.

Another comment mentioned that some schools moved to teach PHP instead of C++. Granted that's an improvement in some aspects to Turbo C++ 3.0, I think the latter might have been better in terms of learning the real fundamentals.

10 years later when I worked as a substitute teacher it was PHP instead which felt more odd as a starting general programming language ...

Each student had their own area on a file server which would be mounted locally and the exercises and respective support material for integration into VS as per exercise were available on the server as per lab session.

Of course, the counter argument is, that it is kind of boring (except for some kids). Alternative is a language, where you easily can get things done. So maybe Python, but thats about it. I am still sad, that LOGO is not used anymore (there is much more to logo than turtle graphics).

When i studied CS at the uni ~2007 we also did it like that for our intro programming courses. I enjoyed it :)

The problem is that the teachers (and the students by extension) don't know that they are learning helpessly outdated things. Nothing would be lost if they were instead learning today's coding styles & paradigms and they could be actually much more creative by using modern practices where the compiler can infer a lot instead of trying to fight with older compilers and doing that: https://github.com/vibhoothiiaanand/CNotepad/blob/dlevel/CNo...

How many security issues will be caused because that student hasn't been taught about global variable issues, std::string, etc... ? I'm not hopeful.

If you want to be "creative", you can do the same thing than this: https://github.com/vibhoothiiaanand/CNotepad/blob/dlevel/CNo... but in much prettier, portable, useful and much less lines of code with e.g. OpenFrameworks: https://openframeworks.cc/ofBook/chapters/lines.html - and at least the tutorial gives you an idea of non-one-letter variable names.

Dear student: please send that to your teachers please : https://github.com/jcelerier/cpp-teaching-manifesto

(I'm an Indian that learned C++ in school using Turbo C++ 10 years ago.)

Outdated? The point of learning programming at that age is to understand the basics - functions / if / for / while, structs / classes, and pointers. All of those work the same in Turbo C++ or in the latest MSVC.

Sure learning C++ via Turbo C++ doesn't prepare the student for modern code that uses `<algorithm>` or `std::shared_ptr` (or `std` at all), but those can always be learned later. The basics are more important.

If anything, the fact that Turbo C++ came with graphics.h meant I could make screensavers like starfield and a visual sudoku solver by myself without any hassle. It made programming fun and was certainly part of the reason I'm a programmer today. I'm not even sure how I would do those with MSVC or gcc today, let alone 10 years ago. WinForms + GDI? SDL? Both are much more complicated than what I remember of graphics.h's API.

Edit: graphics.h was the header with the graphics API, not conio.h

You also have l-value references, r-value references, smart pointers (unique, weak, shared, etc), and many of those have a use-case that overlaps with raw pointers.