I got hooked to computers in mid ‘70s, at the end of the era of punch cards and program listings on accordion paper. At the start of the first semester in CS, I meet a friend from high school, a year older and also in CS who says:
“I have a nice little problem for you. Write a program to find all the ways you can position 8 queens on a chessboard so that they don’t attack each other.”
The only game in town at the time was FORTRAN, and there is no recursion in FORTRAN, and this was my first program so, obviously it didn’t work. Cocky, like most 18 years old are, I said to myself “sure it’s compiler’s fault, my logic is impeccable” so I started to look at the assembler code generated by compiler. The only problem was that I didn’t knew assembler, so I started to learn assembler. Now I couldn’t understand how the compiler knew what code to generate, so I started to learn about context-free grammars, LL(1) and LR(1) parsers, and so on. Never finished the stupid program, but by the end of my adventure, I was thoroughly hooked. And still am.

Best of luck David and D2 team!

It is "exchange sort" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithm#Exchange_sort

One day I may expand this in an article or tip, but for the moment, just wanted to share my first experience with Copilot in Visual Studio.

Context: writing a MTTQ client in C++ almost from scratch.

One line summary: Wow!

After logging in, Copilot started producing ghosted text suggestions, sometimes one line at a time, sometimes full blocks. For the most part it was very accurate and didn't go ahead of itself hallucinating code. It clearly knew a bit about the protocol itself suggesting for instance that a publish method should have a flags parameter. On the other hand, when validating a received PUBLISH packet, it fumbled the flags validation code.

At times it was scaringly accurate: I had my packet sending code spread in various parts of the code with associated critical section locks and error checking. This morning I Visual Studio with the intention of grouping said code in one method. I just pressed "enter" in the header file and Copilot suggested erc send_packet (Packet& pkt);. I felt like it was reading my mind.

In general reminds me of a time when I was doing pair programming with a junior programmer: I had to look over his shoulder and take control from time to time, but it saves so much time on repetitive code sections that is definitely worth it.