XAML/C++: Why learn C++ and not Python?

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Starting to learn about XAML can be found at: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752059.aspx

 

Now the blah-blah, useless stuff, but the following is the reason for the title and article

Python is definitely easier to learn, and so is TouchDevelop (see https://www.TouchDevelop.com).  But is the real guts of software?  First it is C and then C++, both of which can lead to truly visually boring simple or beginning programs.  Products like YoYoGames, TouchDevelop.com, Scirra.com all support your beginning efforts, but these could give you the idea that design is limited to certain domains. 

But what is the variation between learning one of these languages and simply biting the bullet and learning C++?  Well if you think about music instruments, Python, TouchDevelop and even Scirra.com or YoYoGames are like a recorder (a flute like instrument) and C++ is a full orchestra with the ability to play any musical composition, including a recorder.

How to get started with XAML/C++?  Umm, good question, definitely the documentation by Microsoft has “issues” with none of it written as if there is a single C++ programmer who is unfamiliar with XAML, or that there are no interested beginning programmers, or hobbyists or Java Programmers or professors, all who would like some hand holding (including me).

So what to do, what to do?

First, get familiar with XAML, this is an XML based User Presentation tool that is really easy to learn and apparently to write complex tomes (articles) about how to use it.  But seriously it does make things much simpler, it is just that the early adopters, to make things easy for them, have come up with quite a few super hard to understand articles.

Put that link shown at the beginning of the article in your learning “roadmap”, XAML and reviewing the older documents refer to Windows Presentation Foundation, these articles have many of the early and easier to understand articles.  Getting started in XAML can be frustrating when you begin to recognize that the language is just for User Interfaces, but has the ability to abstract out interesting things into just a few lines of XAML code.  This creates a path for the Committee of Complexity (an imaginary committee, I don’t know if one exists) to work out it’s evil plan and generate documents so complex that they make sense only to a few.

To be honest it is difficult for an author to write in a way that keeps the author, this is the same author, interested if they always have to assume that their audience isn’t growing with them.  This is a bad assumption, the audience usually grows out of being interested in that author, and from my analysis the author tries to correct that by writing more and more complex articles, the audience then flees.  The author does this because to write the same way all of the time is boring, plus the author is exploring new ideas and just wants to share them.  Also, some companies require that these authors work at very high levels, sometimes referred to as 400 level.  Gee whiz, most readers that I encounter just want fresh and easy stuff, not fresh and horribly complex stuff.  Why? The audience is naturally distracted by things like classes, work, life, death, and so forth, so they lose the main thread of the author’s writings.

Will my new approach be able to overcome this?  Unlikely.  But sometimes randomness might seem like intelligence, and that is my approach.  I see something shiny, I look at it and then attempt to describe it.  Then if the explanation is really long, and can’t be broken down into a series of articles I give up.  Like Thomas Edison said: “Try, Try, then Ttry again, but after that give up, don’t be a fool about it.”  Ok Edison didn’t really say that, but seriously…

Ok: learning XAML can be found at: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752059.aspx

Note that is pretty old, but, as an example of explanations, if you want to read the BEST explanation of the quadratic equation, then read Isaac Newton, he had to write as if NO one knew what a quadratic equation was.  Mainly because no one did know what a quadratic equation is.  And if you just fainted from reading the words quadratic equation, my apologies, I will be more careful in the future. The point is that early explanations are often the best because the committee of complexity has discovered the exact path to making the explanation so complex only a few can understand it.  (Committee of complexity, again does not exist in reality, or does it?)

Next: HTML 5 and the Committee of Complexity!