CS Unplugged: Teaching material for CS using cards, string and crayons

Re:CS Unplugged: Teaching material for CS using cards, strin... by joelkevinjones on Saturday June 29, 2019 @11:28PM (#20316157)

Do not use string, index cards, and multiple CS PhD students holding the cards to illustrate how garbage collectors work, particularly if most (all?) of the people in the groups haven't written a garbage collector. Trust me on this.

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Re:CS Unplugged: Teaching material for CS using cards, strin... by joelkevinjones on Sunday June 30, 2019 @07:09PM (#20321163)

Ever watch two kittens get themselves all tangled up while playing with a ball of yarn? Imagine being one of those kittens and getting tangled in string in front of an audience of other CS PhD students and senior CS researchers. In addition to the issue that we really couldn't simulate what GC was doing (or even explain it), imagine trying to untangle yourself while doing it.

To answer the question about why GCs are an issue, a GC scans memory, moving objects, updating pointers, writing marks in special headers, etc.

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Re:CS Unplugged: Teaching material for CS using cards, strin... by Redoubts on Sunday June 30, 2019 @11:26AM (#20318690)

As someone who hasn’t written a GC, why is this?

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Re:CS Unplugged: Teaching material for CS using cards, strin... by daveFNbuck on Sunday June 30, 2019 @12:25PM (#20318962)

As someone who hasn't written a GC, how well do you think you could illustrate how one works in a live presentation?

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Re:CS Unplugged: Teaching material for CS using cards, strin... by ckaygusu on Sunday June 30, 2019 @12:04AM (#20316263)

I think they do not.

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