A Student's Perspective

 Welcome back! This is the second and final part in a series of articles about why unmanaged programming languages are the best. In this article, I will be covering the ways in which unmanaged programming languages, such as C++, are far superior to managed languages when it comes to data management and manipulation. Pointers Pointers are literally the best thing since sliced bread...  They seem like such a simple concept, but oh man are they powerful! Basically, a pointer is a variable that holds a memory address. It's actually a little more simple than that. A pointer, at it's lowest level, just holds an integer. This means you can do integer arithmetic with it. It might not be immediately obvious why this is useful, but I'll get to that in a minute. The first thing pointers allow you to do that is pretty neat is to change the data type of a variable very easily. Now, this isn't strictly speaking converting the data to another ty...

In this article, I aim to discuss the benefits of unmanaged programming languages, such as C++. As a currently enrolled Computer Science student and a programmer with at least six years of programming experience, I have come across my fair share of programming languages, from the ubiquitous commercial languages like Java to the extremely specialized and mostly unheard of ones, like Prolog. The point being, in six years of programming, the most useful languages I come across are almost always unmanaged languages. With a couple of exceptions that I will also discuss, such as Python. But wait! I'm not even a programmer! That's okay! (Jeez, stop shouting...) I will be explaining the concepts necessary for understanding my argument in full. So just hold on tight, maybe grab a coffee, and enjoy the ride. Data allocation: Variables If you've never programmed before, you must understand the concept of variables. Specifically, how the underlying memory they are con...