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

https://github.com/vibhoothiiaanand/CNotepad

by mindfreeze • 6 years ago

87 72 6 years ago

oatbix• 6 years ago

I dont know what age range high school encompasses where you are, but assuming its similar to the Uk thats a mighty achivement, especially considering your frank recognition of the bugz

notRobot4• 6 years ago

OP appears to be from India.

I've interacted with several HS graduates from India, and those who opt for CS in HS (11th and 12th grade; usually ages 16-17) are usually taught C++ in Turbo C++ 3.0. This release of Turbo C++ was released in 1990.

That's... not great. For reference, the C++ programming language was first standardized in 1998.

Thus, most graduates never learn proper C++ in the sense that a lot of what they're taught doesn't even compile on modern compilers and they aren't aware of many new* features.

That said, this project is still pretty impressive for an HS student, even if it's written in ancient C++ and requires DOS to run :)

*new = anything introduced to C++ in the last three decades (after 1991).

However, apparently they've introduced Python3 last year, so hopefully the situation will improve :)

mindfreeze4• 6 years ago

Yes,

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++.

pvorb2• 6 years ago

I think the C++ version shouldn't matter that much. High School is for getting people hooked on programming. I learned Borland Delphi in High School and a bit of PHP and C. I later studied CS where these languages were mostly irrelevant, but nevertheless it was a good foundation for learning other languages.

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.

woggy• 6 years ago

We were taught programming in high school in QBasic (2005-2006). It was fun and we learned a lot. I don't think it matters how old the language is.

larodi• 6 years ago

I've been spittings hundreds of c++ code back in 1996-1999, not knowing that it was not...standardized. You may be astonished at the complexity. The only downside was that it took minutes to compile it on 386DX and Borland's C compiler was faster with C. Inline assembly was a commonplace back in the day, so to know C/C++ actually meant to know Assembly and hand-optimize code more often than not.

noobermin2• 6 years ago

I learned C at 14 to 15 from a compiler tutorial. I did however, learn C++ from reading the C++faqs in college and today, years later I still mostly don't get internals in C++ (I don't really understand move semantics but from what I understand the compiler does a better job than me). C++ is a ballooning language and really mastering the thing seems impossible if you have a day job that doesn't involve mastering it.

accurrent• 6 years ago

I see nothing wrong in learning progaming using old tools. The key thing is to deliver the basic concepts required for problem solving. In all honesty a student can learn "proper" C++ at a later stage.

lioeters• 6 years ago

This release of Turbo C++ was released in 1990.. That said, this project is still pretty impressive for an HS student, even if it's written in ancient C++ and requires DOS to run :)

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.

gambiting• 6 years ago

In Poland we had c++ as part of the curriculum around the ages 16-19. Granted, all projects were just simple algorithms, like for sorting digits and finding the shortest paths, but still.

rightbyte• 6 years ago

Same in sweden some time ago around 2007. I wonder why they didn't picked like C, BASIC or Pascal or something. C++ feels very unforgiving as a starter language.

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

LandR• 6 years ago

In my CSYS Computing Course in high school in the UK we used C.

It was very very basic stuff though.

Still, I was able to basically walk through my first year at Uni (which was exclusively C programming) with almost zero effort.

maxfan8• 6 years ago

Shouldn’t the title of this have a “Show HN: “ prepended?

mindfreeze4• 6 years ago

Updated, Thanks

notRobot4• 6 years ago

    #include<conio.h>
    #include<dos.h>

This appears to be for DOS, and I'm betting this was written in Turbo C++. From what I've heard from my friends, almost all schools in India still use Turbo C++ (in DosBox) to teach C++. Ew.

magnio• 6 years ago

What is used in other countries? I assume Visual Studio or Eclipse? We used Code::Blocks in our high school.

notRobot4• 6 years ago

I've also heard of gcc/g++ being used along with vim or Geany.

pjmlp5• 6 years ago

When I was a TA (late 90's), we were using Windows 98 with Visual C++. Memory is fuzzy, I think it was version 5.0.

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.

tuankiet65• 6 years ago

If it's still the case then the Vietnamese curriculum (in middle and high school) still teaches Pascal using Turbo Pascal. They (the Ministry of Education) probably doesn't feel like modernizing it though because it's not widely taught, and from my own experience most students (and teachers!) neglect it anyway.

andi999• 6 years ago

Actually I think TP is quite good for that. Compilation time is (really) fast, and it is close enough to the metal to learn about the foundational structure of the computer and programming languages; the language is well defined. Syntax is (sort of) shared by ada if one later needs production grade.

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).

udbhavs• 6 years ago

Yeah, we were taught the basics of C++ in 7th grade using Turbo. However, the two major boards of education here use Java and Python in high school now so from 8th grade onwards we did most of our work in BlueJ (examinations still happen by writing programs on paper, though).

cpach2• 6 years ago

”examinations still happen by writing programs on paper, though“

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

cpach2• 6 years ago

Instead of displaying disgust, why not try to say something uplifting instead? Constraints like using a limited environment can do wonders for people’s creativity.

fortran772• 6 years ago

My high school taught BASIC PLUS on a DEC PDP-11. Granted this was in 1977.

jcelerier2• 6 years ago

Constraints like using a limited environment can do wonders for people’s creativity

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

pjmlp5• 6 years ago

Yes, even Bjarne mentions this in one of his talks.

Not sure what to think really, should we get angry how younger generations get taught so outdated information, or be happy that at least they learn something that will allow them to jumpstart into something better years later.

Arnavion2• 6 years ago

Not sure what to think really, should we get angry how younger generations get taught so outdated information

(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

reassembled• 6 years ago

36 year old me is very glad to have learned VGA graphics programming with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ during high school. I've met kids these days coming out of university CS degrees in the U.S.A. that still don't have a solid grasp on how pointers work.

I believe it is in every programmer's interest to have a deep understanding of the system for which they are working on, even if they don't need to use the low level tools from day to day. Teaching C++ in DOS can still provide an excellent CS foundation IMO.

29athrowaway2• 6 years ago

Raw pointers in C++ are an introductory concept at this point.

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.

saurik• 6 years ago

I would even argue it is much better than trying to do so on a more modern system, as you directly can just use graphics and color (which is both fun and helps teach a lot of programming concepts that are useful to know for building UIs later) without wasting a ton of time learning some UI toolkit that will be neither instructive nor actually-useful in the real world (as even if you choose a good one, it is almost certainly going to be obsolete by the time you go to get a job).

29athrowaway2• 6 years ago

Learning C++ with Borland Turbo C++ for DOS can have some learning value, but landing a C++ job with that may not be easy.

gcc and clang are distributed free of cost, and so is Linux. They should switch to those compilers and teach a modern dialect of C++.

entha_saava2• 6 years ago

Many teaching faculty are resistant to change because it requires them to learn something. That's the biggest problem. although some boards have successfully switched to teaching python.

simion314• 6 years ago

First year of programming is more about learning the basics and not the language. Like the students will learn basic stuff like finding the digits of a number or implementing other algorithms. Then passionate students discover the graphics libraries and then start playing with that draw different cool stuff like effects or make simple games like Tic Tac Toe.

conclusion, in first year in schools you might have different level of students, they do not learn a language so they start a career with that language, they start with the basic stuff and hopefully a large number of students are attracted. Probably the teacher is lucky if majority of the students could handle homework on their-own so attempting to add more information that is not relevant is not useful.

I am attempting to teach my son programming, he likes to play Gary's mod and there he can script stuff, I observe very interesting things(he is 14) like I need to explain and force him to ident the code to make it readable (imagine how extra messy would be with python) or I explain a few times that you can have local variables or function parameters reuse same names but for some reason he gets confused when 2 different things have same name. 1

analog31• 6 years ago

I wonder how many of us who started on the "wrong" language or outdated tooling were actually handicapped by doing so in the long run. I started on BASIC, the kind with line numbers.

zozbot234• 6 years ago

As far as pure UX is concerned, Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ are still a gold standard of text-mode IDE's.

Emacs has tried to add a bit of the same featureset lately, like it will show a primitive TUI menubar if you launch it from a terminal but it's quite half-baked; the look and feel is sub-standard, and mouse interaction (via gpm or xterm) doesn't actually work by default. (Of course I realize that capturing mouse events is not always desired but it should be reasonably easy to allow this, maybe even as a default.) And it still lacks other basic UX elements like floating windows for dialog boxes, or resizing/rearranging windows with the mouse.

FreePascal still ships a proper TUI IDE, and there's a FreeDOS text-mode IDE for C/C++ known as RHIDE.

giancarlostoro• 6 years ago

Mine's not as cool but I did a similar project using Qt and C++:

https://github.com/Giancarlos/qNotePad

I wanted to make a cross platform text editor that was simple and consistent throughout different platforms. I found it easier to do it in Delphi cause I wasn't sure how to hook up a syntax highlighter for it. I'm proud of the small bits I did code though. C++ isn't really my strongest language.

trashburger• 6 years ago

The function declarations are formatted in such a way that it makes you think the prototypes come after.

Solid project, but I suggest you run the file through something like clang-format.

zerr• 6 years ago

What school was it? :) Maybe you could share the curriculum/syllabus of coding classes in that school? Thanks!

mindfreeze4• 6 years ago

It is Kendriya Vidyalaya[1], chain of Central Government Schools in India, so they have almost one school in almost in a district of a state. or sometimes two or three in the state depending on Population Density.

So at that time Syllabus is something like this[2], it is not exactly same, almost same and I think this was overall pattern of that[2], now it is again revamped[3].

At our time it was more like 4 hours theory/week and 1.5/2 hours lab sessions(which sometimes becomes theory).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendriya_Vidyalaya

[2] https://www.kv1bhuj.org/admin/downloads/1997118251study_mate...

[3] http://cbseacademic.nic.in/web_material/Curriculum19/Main-Se...

oars• 6 years ago

No matter what language type of C++ he is using, I find this an amazing achievement for a high schooler.

I didn't write my first line of code until I was 20 years old in college, and 8 years later I am now a lead developer at one of my country's largest telecommunications companies.

I can't imagine how amazing this guy is going to become being able to build this at such a young age. Keep it up!

qwerty12345992• 6 years ago

There's lots of kids as young as like 12 out there on the internet programming complex projects all on their own.

Granted, it is amateurish code for amateurish projects, but the users don't care and gladly eat it up.

qwerty12345992• 6 years ago

This is mostly related to video games by the way, so mods, cheats, helper programs, bots you name it and the person creating them is often a kid.

oldlinux• 6 years ago

This guy comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egukLtEhyP0

popotamonga• 6 years ago

I started coding at 8 and didnt turn up nothing special. The only difference between me and my peers is that i earn 5x more but that doesnt mean much, probably just lucky.

nickjj3• 6 years ago

Building a text editor is fun. It's the ultimate scratch your own itch project.

I remember building one back in the day (2002) with Visual Basic 6.

Unfortunately I lost the source code but I still have the website's code. Feature wise it had syntax highlighting, column selection, project wide find / replace, file edit history (timeline), multiple clipboards, splits and more.

Does anyone remember what that really good text editor control was in VB6? It did most of the heavy lifting. It wasn't a built-in control.

chaoticmass• 6 years ago

Rich text box?

nickjj3• 6 years ago

Nope, it was a third party control. I believe it was originally written in C but someone wrapped a VB6 control around it.

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.

wila• 6 years ago

That sounds like CodeMax, or its descendent CodeSense.

CodeMax was originally a product by Barry Allyn (WinMain software) and it was pretty good.

Unfortunately though for him the market was pretty small and it was difficult to survive as a commercial product. It was open source for a short while and that was when CodeSense came about.

nickjj3• 6 years ago

Hmm, it definitely wasn't CodeMax but CodeSense rings a bell, but I'm only about 10% sure it was CodeSense.

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.

smlckz• 6 years ago

Nice.

> I would now love to opensource the project for everyone.

Where is the license?

Learn more about licensing here: https://help.github.com/en/articles/licensing-a-repository

projektfu• 6 years ago

If you like stories about kids going way above and beyond in programming, read about Raymond Lau and Stuffit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StuffIt

g105b• 6 years ago

I don't care how many bugs it's got. The fact you've done something that isn't 700MB Electron app gets my upvote. Great work!

nnoitra• 6 years ago

Simple thinking is frowned upon nowadays.

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

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