Grad Student Looking To Contribute To Open Source

An anonymous reader writes "I'm an Applied Math grad student who knows a bit of Mathematics and a bit of programming. C++ is my first programming language — I am decent at it. I wish to start contributing to a numerical library with two purposes — contribute to open source and develop my C++ skills at the same time. I looked at the Boost libraries and joined the developer list. However, I have no idea on how to start contributing. I'm not an expert in template programming, having written only toy programs to understand that concept. I've used some of the OOP constructs like inheritance,but only for very small projects. Do you have any tips on how to get started on contribution? Are there any other emerging numerical libraries to which I can contribute? Are there any other avenues where I can contribute to open source and improve programming skills?"

Re:Fix bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

4. Profit!

Wait, what?

Re:Kinematics

[phillips321]

You lost me pretty early on, i think after the 2 words "I work". What is this "work" thing you are on about? Fair play though, this would take a considerable amount of effort and time and i doubt anyone in the open source world would benefit from this unfortunately, please correct me if i'm wrong and provide an example of how an ATC system could be used 'at home'

Re:PATCH DAMN YOU !! LIKE YOU NEVER PATCHED BEFORE

[airfoobar]

Extrapolating from how #2 smells relative to #1, NUMBER TEN must smell really awful.

Re:C++ is convoluted and hard

[Joce640k]

C++ doesn't teach you anything, you study it.

From the summary it sounds like he learned C, not C++. There's a huge, grand-canyon-sized difference between the two.

C++ is a safe, expressive, modern language - like Java but without all the horrible limitations. Yes it takes a bit of study and it's not for casual programmers, but the results are worth it.

C is much lower level, unsafe language. Good for what it does but dangerous and a very bad choice for large projects.

Re:Well

[Lusa]

Mod this up! This is so insightful it should be a tattoo!

Re:Maxima

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia says that maxima is written in (hold on to something) Common Lisp. Is that really true? I mean Lisp is fun for penalizing CS freshmen and all, but seriously?

Re:All good languages are "unsafe"

[stanlyb]

Next time you start your car, try to not to think of all these ECU using pure, clean and unsafe C code.............

Re:Maxima

[zill]

I mean Lisp is fun for penalizing CS freshmen and all, but seriously?

MIT was forced to cancel 6.001 after SCOTUS ruled that learned Lisp was cruel and unusual punishment.

Re:Fix bugs

[RockDoctor]

FOSS programmers will all receive 72 virgins after they ascent to heaven.

FOSS programmers who learn to check they're spelling the correct word correctly, get 73 virgins, and you get to choose which gender (or genders) they are, because you so obviously pay attention to small details.