Computer Programming. What's so appealing? - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

-Ever- · 08-25-2003, 08:32 AM

My dad got me into computers when I was bout 7 years old and they've been the other half of my brain ever since. Whether it be internet surfing, playing video games, using photoshop, watching DVD's, or building them, I just am always attracted to my computer. Call it a bad thing if you want, but that's just how it is for now.
I'm wondering what's so appealing about computer programming. I've always heard that people say it's so boring because you "sit infront of your computer for hours at a time troubleshooting with symbols..." This actually seems sort of cool to me! Not in the plain form, but if the trouble shooting was for a larger cause, IE making some cool new program come to life.
Anyone care to share their experiences? I'm sure programming is hard in general, but how hard is it to write simple programs and games? I've done extremely elementary script editing before for some video game mods and I understood how it worked quite easily. I'm an extremely visual learner so it really doesn't phase me whether I'm working with letters or symbols.
Thanks guys
-T

Fallon · 08-25-2003, 08:36 AM

For me, the reason I like programming is I like to see something that I didn't think would work, work. I program on a mud, so I definately have people using what I program so I get basically insta-gratification for it. Also I get feedback on how badly it sucks =p.

Antagony · 08-25-2003, 08:52 AM

Creation is the most powerful of forces. You write code, you get frustrated with it, you fix your errors, and you get to see your wonderful creation do as you desired.

It's unlike anything else.

bogosj13 · 08-25-2003, 09:08 AM

Although I find myself to be a very logically oriented person, I think that programming may be what I use to vent my creative energies.

I think the main draw for me with programming is the act of creating "something" out of "nothing". It's an execise in thought, from which a useful tool or toy may emerge. I know that "nothing" is really the language and the machine (or virtual machine), but basically you turn ideas into reality (or as much you can consider software reality, it's still just bits of magentic flux on a metal platter somewhere).

-Ever- · 08-25-2003, 09:12 AM

Interesting to see such passionate responses so far. So what would you recomend me looking into? College level courses of computer science? C++ and Java ring a bell however I really don't know the slightest thing about what they do. Also, what's the learning curve for programming? Starting from scratch, would I spend the next 3 years of programming and only be able to make a tic-tac-toe game?

:\

Antagony · 08-25-2003, 09:38 AM

College-level CS courses should be alright since most of the entry-level CS courses assume you have no previous programming experience.

Learning curve for programming? It's infinite, really ... there's always more to learn. However, as for practicality, you should be able to write useful programs within a few months if you buckle down and work hard.

asshopo · 08-25-2003, 09:43 AM

I love programming because I can create things; things that don't exist yet. For example, I used to be into eGroups alot and wanted a way to collect all the attachments. It was a bitch to do it all by hand, message per message. So I wrote a program to do it. Then found out that others wanted it, so I released it as freeware. I have/had around 4k people using it on a regular basis. NICE feeling. It was MINE, no one else asked me to make it, it was purly MY creation.

Then yahoo bought eGroups, made it suck, and now my program is useless because yahoo took away attachments unless you have them mailed to you.

Bastards

AL9045 · 08-25-2003, 11:32 AM

I "like" programming, but whenever I see code, I ask someone else to program it, actually I think I'm more interested in the final result.

Lebell · 08-25-2003, 12:18 PM

You need to start with a basic intro programming course that deals with the basics (programming structures and data structures in basic, C, pascal, fortran, cobol) before moving onto an Object Oriented language like C++ and Java.

And HTML is not a programming language, it is a scripting language.

AL9045 · 08-25-2003, 12:22 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Lebell
You need to start with a basic intro programming course that deals with the basics (programming structures and data structures in basic, C, pascal, fortran, cobol) before moving onto an Object Oriented language like C++ and Java.

And HTML is not a programming language, it is a scripting language.

Thanks, I'm taking Java next year, so hopefully it'll be fun and easy.

bogosj13 · 08-25-2003, 12:23 PM

Not to get technical... but HTML is a mark-up language, not scripting language. You can't perform any logic with HTML alone, you need to pair a scripting language like JavaScript or VBScript with it.

Lebell · 08-25-2003, 12:25 PM

I'm starting Java next week after taking Object Oriented Design and Analysis and C before that.

For some odd reason, the University I attend teaches programming and data structures using Pascal.

Go Figure.

Antagony · 08-25-2003, 12:31 PM

aahahahaha, Pascal ... I'm so sorry.

Pascal was the first programming language I had to seriously undertake, but then Texas Education officially switched over to C++.

juanvaldes · 08-25-2003, 01:14 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Antagony
Creation is the most powerful of forces. You write code, you get frustrated with it, you fix your errors, and you get to see your wonderful creation do as you desired.

It's unlike anything else.

That says it right there.

And as asshopo said, it's great to sit down and write something that YOU want and not have to wait/depend on someone else to want/need it first. For instance I have my own scripts/apps I developed just for this site.

Another great thing is Open Source projects. My AIM cleint (Adium) is open so I took the code and changed around the smilies to my own prefrences. Nothing big or special just a nice little tweak to my own personalized IM client.

Zello · 08-25-2003, 01:27 PM

-Ever-, I took a year of C++ in highschool. He taught us all the basics and then introduced us to making a game using the CDX engine. By the end of the year I was able to make a nice arcade shooting game. I didn't get around to adding sound or animations but I could have. BTW the address to the game is my homepage in profile. I would love to work on it but the source code was lost in a format. I don't have the patience to do that all over again.

Also, I absolutly love programming. Everytime I solve a problem it feels great. Hope you enjoy it.

As a side note, everyone says that you need to learn C before you learn C++. I don't even know what the difference is because as far as I know I've never used it.

skinbag · 08-25-2003, 04:28 PM

Just curious..Do you folks program for fun or is it a good way to make a living?

dunkelhelmut · 08-25-2003, 04:37 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by skinbag
Just curious..Do you folks program for fun or is it a good way to make a living?

I'll side with both

I program for a living. It's what I do. I've coded in so many different languages and environments that I've lost count.

I also code for fun. Here are some projects I've written.
- An online MP3 jukebox catalog with searching and resampling (PHP)
- A 3D viewer for parks created in Rollercoaster Tycoon (C++ / OpenGL) - http://www.rctgl.com
- A 3D viewer for massively detailed worlds (current project)
- All of the code behind my fraternity's official site (PHP)
- A wallpaper changer (VB)

Plus numerous other projects

I think it's fun to program. The power you have in your own hands is incredible, and it is a thrill to see one of your creations develop and mature into something real.

Another beauty of programming is that you can create a tool which will help you do something. For example, I was tired of looking at the same wallpapers on my desktop, and I didn't want hundreds of megs dedicated to wallpaper storage. So, I wrote a program that downloads wallpapers from the net automatically, and resizes them proportionally to fit your desktop.

Antagony · 08-25-2003, 05:20 PM

For now I program for fun, although it is my course of study (Computer Science major). But two points:

a.) I really don't do much programming for classes anymore. I'm past most of that.

b.) I do *lots* of programming on my own time. My specialty is PHP. Although I've only done it for fun so far, I have a tech friend who is going to contract me out to code some for his company.

So yeah, again it's both like dunkelhelmut. I'm not entirely sure that programming will be involved in my career path, but I will always keep the skills around and use them for "fun".

charliex · 08-25-2003, 06:25 PM

I started coding because i was curious, typical scorpio, and i still do

theres always something new to learn, puzzles to solve..

I'm actually less interested in the final product, more in the road taken, I rarely play any of the games i've written, and its only productivity tools that i've written that i frequently use.

Most of the time I just do it to see if it can be done, like OpenGL in pure DOS for instance, though i was suprised to see how popular it was, and it did become the basis for linuxs first OpenGL support.

twister002 · 08-25-2003, 10:46 PM

My 'Love' of programming is based more out of necessity, which is the mother of aggrevation.

I started out taking some LOGO and Pascal classes in elementary school on the Apple II's we had at the time. I moved on to the TI-994a and the programs in the back of Compute! magazine, I wanted to play some games and they were the best source.

Then I moved on to the C=64, started out with some basic, then learned some machine language. I wanted to do cool things with my computer, make my games run a little faster, write some small database type applications, etc...

Then there were the dark days of DOS, I uhmmmm, did lots of batch file programming. Ran a WWIV BBS and learned just enough C to be able to modify the source and customize my BBS.

I went to college, my Biochem major didn't really call for a lot of programming. Except for VBA and VB programming in Excell, LOTS of that in research.

I parlayed my VB knowledge into some positions after college. Picked up languages(Java, C++, PHP) and frameworks (JSP/servlets, ASP, VB COM) as needed and now I'm doing some C#, programming in ASP.NET.

Really as I look back, I'm more of a frustrated game programmer, writing business programs and dynamic web sites pays the bills. I often wonder where I'd be today if I had learned more early on in the ZORK and Apogee days?

So I've had absolutely no formal training in computer programming, yet most of the time when I join a new company or start a new project I end up as one of the more senior people on the project. So my advice to anyone wanting to become a programmer I think would just be "Program, a lot. Make mistakes, learn from them." I always tell someone whenever I give them a solution to their problem, usually one they never thought would work, that it just means I've screwed up in the same way twice already. Once someone told ME how to fix it, and the second time I had to try and remember what I did the first time.

kalisto_911 · 08-26-2003, 07:31 AM

I have heard of 2 different styles of programming called Pearl and Assembly, how do you guys feel about these?

TwoToTango · 08-26-2003, 07:45 AM

I'll second everything that's been said about
programming being a creative endeavor,
and tack on a couple of observations of my
own.

1) I love debugging -- my code or others'. It's
sleuthing at its most fascinating: subtle clues,
carefully laid traps, street-smarts. Give me a
bizarre crash that occurs apparently at random
with no trace of recent mods in the likely area,
and I'm in Sherlock Holmes heaven.

2) Computer programmers are like civil engineers
who can, if they need to, change the laws of
nature. Don't like gravity at 9.8 m/s/s?
Change it! Need your structural steel to
be nice and mushy when pushed along the
X-axis but rigid otherwise? Invent it! The
programmer's answer to every question of
"Can you...?" is "Of course -- after all, it's
only software." (Knowing how to set a price
and schedule on "of course" is an entirely
different matter.)

3) When you make something useful, the
daily lives of other people are made better.
That's quite satisfying.

It is fun. I've been doing it for a living for
more than 25 years. The cool thing is that
people keep paying me

skinbag · 08-26-2003, 07:55 AM

Are you $ earners rare, or is there always work for a capable programmer?

Dave · 08-26-2003, 08:01 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by kalisto_911
I have heard of 2 different styles of programming called Pearl and Assembly, how do you guys feel about these?

Those aren't styles, their languages (well, one is).

It's not pearl, it's perl (Practical Extraction and Report language). It's a very powerful (and easy to do write only code in) language.

An example of some (abeit probably very bad) perl to remove "#" delimited comments from input would be:

Code:

while(<>){
    s/#.*$//;
    print;
}

Assembly usually refers the a language one step above machine code. It's very specific to each processor architecture (be it sparc, alpha, mips, m68k, etc).

My favourite architecture for assembly is sparc. Mmmm, register windows

Unfortunately, it's quite hard to put some example assembly into here as it's usually very long (due to each line generally referring to one instruction in a program). It's also a very hard to start with assembly, but the learning curve is quite short (depending on the architecture). You just have to teach yourself to thing like a processor (load this, act on it, store it).

Personally when it comes to programming, I just love that I never stop learning. When I start to get bored with something, that just means it's time to try and learn another obscure language or concept.

Then, there are those things that I learn about with no intention of ever putting to use. ie. I recently read the manual for intercal, that was painful, especially when it starts to talk about tri-intercal

\end{rant}

Antagony · 08-26-2003, 08:20 AM

kalisto_911,

As Dave mentioned, those are programming languages. There are many many different languages. C, C++, C#, Pascal, Python, Perl, PHP ... the list goes on and on.

omnigod · 08-26-2003, 10:12 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by -Ever-
making some cool new program come to life.

You answered your own question. You get the best feeling when you create your own world.

If you want to feel something really good, after you learn c++, get into artificial intelligence and graphics.

I learned in this order:
C++
OpenGL
Artificial Intelligence - you cant really "learn" AI, you just learn what works and what doesnt.
Windows
DirectX

cheerios · 08-26-2003, 11:44 AM

graphics.. no thanks :P I'll stick w/ NOT fighting w/ GL and directX, thanks!

skinbag: The market varies from place to place, in the states, anyway. California, which is where i am, is in a slump, but i've been told DC's got a lot of opportunities, as well as Louisiana. so... On the other hand, I know a couple alumni from my college who still come visit who are making some serious dough out here working for the govt. But, in general, things are a bit tight, market's a bit glutted. hopefully the economy will pick up and that'll change about when I graduate

(god whole generations of coders are making that prayer right now!) So, it CAN be lucrative, but i wouldn't say you can ALWAYS find work, and what you find may not be what you want to do.

As for why I code? 'cuz i can. well. and it's fun.

languages: have to disagree w/ Lebell about learning something functional before something Object-Oriented. I started in C, also, but one isn't really any harder than the other, it's just another way of thinking about it.

I learned:
C
C++/Perl/Obj-C (all around hte same time)
Java

and on my plate for this semester are at the least smalltalk and something scripting... python or ruby, maybe.

charliex · 08-26-2003, 11:56 AM

Code:

mox ah,9
mov dx,offset helloworld
int 21
ret

helloworld db 'Hello world$'

simple asm example for msdos/x86

i feel very fortunate as i started off in asm , and i feel that if you learn asm you can pretty much get anywhere since although each chip has a different instruction set the ideas are the same.

OO is a methodology, you learn about OO programming, its not about a particular language, just some languages are designed with it in mind, you can write OO in asm , C or pascal.

I live in southern california, and the market here is probably the strongest around, i get daily calls from people looking for more good programmers.

poof · 08-26-2003, 09:42 PM

I had a psy120 class in the eighties tought by an instructor that declared that people involved heavily into computers where insecure around other people. He furthered that notion with his idea that programmers and other computer people where only happy in the world they were able to create for themselves where they were in total control.

He gave our final grade by the average he had created on a spreadsheet.

cartmen34 · 08-27-2003, 09:23 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by poof
I had a psy120 class in the eighties tought by an instructor that declared that people involved heavily into computers where insecure around other people. He furthered that notion with his idea that programmers and other computer people where only happy in the world they were able to create for themselves where they were in total control.

He gave our final grade by the average he had created on a spreadsheet.

I'd trust what a programmer tells me over a psycho babbling psych teacher any day.

I lived in Silicon Valley for 4 years, and while I did meet a couple of "typical computer nerd types", most of the techies and programmers I met were VERY cool people. Normal and fun-loving, just like the rest of us. I worked in the tech industry, so I was exposed to this kind of life style on a daily basis.

I actually aspire to be a programmer because of my experiences. I'm currently in school, taking the basics, like VB, and Java. I hope to someday be a full fledged c++ programmer.

TIO · 08-27-2003, 09:35 AM

Everyone wonders why I do it: I bash my head against the pooter all day and all night, just to get one short bit of code working.

None of them know how nice it is the first time your code runs perfectly

kalisto_911 · 08-28-2003, 07:17 AM

Thanks for answering my questions. I wish there were more hours in the day, I might teach mysef programming if I had the time.

irseg · 08-28-2003, 10:39 AM

Like the other people said, it's all about creating something from nothing and seeing it succeed.

My best friend and I made a website together, he did the design/marketing and I did the programming. It is becoming VERY widely used and profitable. We're finding mention of it all over the place and the traffic is growing phenomenally.

It's really fucking cool to see where it is now, and remember all those times we sat around at 4 in the morning all doped up on coffee and nicotine just talking and hashing it out. Seeing those ideas we threw around become reality, and then seeing that become successful is an incredible feeling.

juanvaldes · 08-28-2003, 04:33 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by TIO
None of them know how nice it is the first time your code runs perfectly

The best is when it works right hte first time. Your like "what? that' it? no debuging?" and are in stunned disbeliefe until you foobar the next code

twister002 · 08-28-2003, 08:28 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by juanvaldes
The best is when it works right hte first time. Your like "what? that' it? no debuging?" and are in stunned disbeliefe until you foobar the next code

That is SO true.

I wrote 3 or 4 classes the other day in C# without checking to see if they would even compile. I was so happy when I hit "build solution" and then tested them out I went and found people to tell.

Of course I'm weird.

GarthInPittsburgh · 08-28-2003, 08:41 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by juanvaldes
The best is when it works right hte first time. Your like "what? that' it? no debuging?" and are in stunned disbeliefe until you foobar the next code

In my comsci class, that worked exactly once. On something very basic. I just creating something to bring down the system if one of my buddies left to go to the bathroom.

Actually, now that I think about it, besides the lame stuff we learned, that's all I really know how to do.

rmarshall · 08-29-2003, 02:01 PM

I remember in 1980 when I got my Apple ][ (standard) . I got it with 2 disk drives and the 16k language card.

I was going to university at night studying Computer Science. We studied Pascal. I had UCSD Pascal on the Apple. I handed in printout from my Centronics 737 printer. The other students were in awe!

I had been married for a year and was so involved in the computer, my wife would sit, naked, on the edge of the desk and I wouldn't notice.

I still love computers, but if my girlfriend flashes a tit and says to come to bed, I don't love the computer that much.

jujueye · 08-29-2003, 05:44 PM

Feh....programming....well, you asked for it........

I really enjoyed programming when I did it for a living. It wasnt bad, really. The problem that drove me to another tech field was Microsoft. Yeah, go figure. In their effor to update their Visual Studio product, they continued to add more new features, and the learning curve went to nearly vertical. So, on top of keeping up on the latest cool code tricks, and the new operating systems, it was very necessary to keep up on the main tool used for development. That's where I jumped off and headed for far more stable ground.

I totally enjoyed the whole creation aspect. From spec to Beta release, it was a blast. I just got so SO tired of reading documentation just to learn how to make a stupid Hello Useless World program.

viejo gringo · 08-29-2003, 07:46 PM

Worked for a Fotune 100 company for 38 years, ---20+ years of that writing code. Back then we coded in ANSI COBOL....and we didn't just write programs, we designed and built systems, with as many as 10 programms all connected by JCL (Job Control Language)....Yea, we were a strange lot---waking up in the middle of the night and finding a codeing sheet because you just figured out the logic for a whole program. One of our biggest accomplishments was designing and build a process into every program so that it never abended online, and have to get up in the middle of the night to fix it. we even built a system that eleminated all printed paper. Profitable?? Maybe not by todays standards, but $28 an hour plus all benifits payed seem great back then. The greatest thrill was building something that worked
and not getting your hands dirty. The learning curve---well they put us through an intense 8 week coarse, and said "now you are one"--which I thought was pretty good since I never had a grade in math over a C in highschool. Mostly it was logic, just plain dumb logic.
If you get into this field you must realize that you never stop learning--if you blink your eyes something new will pass you by...

juanvaldes · 08-29-2003, 07:47 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by rmarshall
I had been married for a year and was so involved in the computer, my wife would sit, naked, on the edge of the desk and I wouldn't notice.

I still love computers, but if my girlfriend flashes a tit and says to come to bed, I don't love the computer that much.

You would not believe how many times I have been to pre-occupied to notice a naked women next to me.

08-25-2003, 08:32 AM	#1 (permalink)
-Ever- Junkie Location: San Francisco	Computer Programming. What's so appealing? My dad got me into computers when I was bout 7 years old and they've been the other half of my brain ever since. Whether it be internet surfing, playing video games, using photoshop, watching DVD's, or building them, I just am always attracted to my computer. Call it a bad thing if you want, but that's just how it is for now. I'm wondering what's so appealing about computer programming. I've always heard that people say it's so boring because you "sit infront of your computer for hours at a time troubleshooting with symbols..." This actually seems sort of cool to me! Not in the plain form, but if the trouble shooting was for a larger cause, IE making some cool new program come to life. Anyone care to share their experiences? I'm sure programming is hard in general, but how hard is it to write simple programs and games? I've done extremely elementary script editing before for some video game mods and I understood how it worked quite easily. I'm an extremely visual learner so it really doesn't phase me whether I'm working with letters or symbols. Thanks guys -T __________________ Embracing the goddess energy within yourselves will bring all of you to a new understanding and valuing of life. A vision that inspires you to live and love on planet Earth. Like a priceless jewel buried in dark layers of soil and stone, Earth radiates her brilliant beauty into the caverns of space and time. Perhaps you are aware of those who watch over your home And experience of this place to visit and play with reality. You are becoming aware of yourself as a gamemaster... --Acknowledge your weaknesses--

08-25-2003, 08:52 AM	#3 (permalink)
Antagony Psychopathic Akimbo Action Pirate Location: ...between Christ and Belial.	Creation is the most powerful of forces. You write code, you get frustrated with it, you fix your errors, and you get to see your wonderful creation do as you desired. It's unlike anything else. __________________ On the outside I'm jazz, but my soul is rock and roll. Sleep is a waste of time. Join the Insomniac Club. "GYOH GWAH-DAH GREH BLAAA! SROH WIH DIH FLIH RYOHH!!" - The Locust

08-25-2003, 09:12 AM	#5 (permalink)
-Ever- Junkie Location: San Francisco	Interesting to see such passionate responses so far. So what would you recomend me looking into? College level courses of computer science? C++ and Java ring a bell however I really don't know the slightest thing about what they do. Also, what's the learning curve for programming? Starting from scratch, would I spend the next 3 years of programming and only be able to make a tic-tac-toe game? :\ __________________ Embracing the goddess energy within yourselves will bring all of you to a new understanding and valuing of life. A vision that inspires you to live and love on planet Earth. Like a priceless jewel buried in dark layers of soil and stone, Earth radiates her brilliant beauty into the caverns of space and time. Perhaps you are aware of those who watch over your home And experience of this place to visit and play with reality. You are becoming aware of yourself as a gamemaster... --Acknowledge your weaknesses--

08-25-2003, 09:38 AM	#6 (permalink)
Antagony Psychopathic Akimbo Action Pirate Location: ...between Christ and Belial.	College-level CS courses should be alright since most of the entry-level CS courses assume you have no previous programming experience. Learning curve for programming? It's infinite, really ... there's always more to learn. However, as for practicality, you should be able to write useful programs within a few months if you buckle down and work hard. __________________ On the outside I'm jazz, but my soul is rock and roll. Sleep is a waste of time. Join the Insomniac Club. "GYOH GWAH-DAH GREH BLAAA! SROH WIH DIH FLIH RYOHH!!" - The Locust

08-25-2003, 09:43 AM	#7 (permalink)
asshopo Insane Location: Michigan	I love programming because I can create things; things that don't exist yet. For example, I used to be into eGroups alot and wanted a way to collect all the attachments. It was a bitch to do it all by hand, message per message. So I wrote a program to do it. Then found out that others wanted it, so I released it as freeware. I have/had around 4k people using it on a regular basis. NICE feeling. It was MINE, no one else asked me to make it, it was purly MY creation. Then yahoo bought eGroups, made it suck, and now my program is useless because yahoo took away attachments unless you have them mailed to you. Bastards __________________ Patterns have a habit of repeating themselves.

08-25-2003, 08:36 AM	#2 (permalink)
Fallon Junkie Location: RI	For me, the reason I like programming is I like to see something that I didn't think would work, work. I program on a mud, so I definately have people using what I program so I get basically insta-gratification for it. Also I get feedback on how badly it sucks =p.

08-25-2003, 09:08 AM	#4 (permalink)
bogosj13 Upright	Although I find myself to be a very logically oriented person, I think that programming may be what I use to vent my creative energies. I think the main draw for me with programming is the act of creating "something" out of "nothing". It's an execise in thought, from which a useful tool or toy may emerge. I know that "nothing" is really the language and the machine (or virtual machine), but basically you turn ideas into reality (or as much you can consider software reality, it's still just bits of magentic flux on a metal platter somewhere).

08-25-2003, 11:32 AM	#8 (permalink)
AL9045 Addict Location: Virginia	I "like" programming, but whenever I see code, I ask someone else to program it, actually I think I'm more interested in the final result.

08-25-2003, 12:18 PM	#9 (permalink)
Lebell Cracking the Whip Location: Sexymama's arms...	You need to start with a basic intro programming course that deals with the basics (programming structures and data structures in basic, C, pascal, fortran, cobol) before moving onto an Object Oriented language like C++ and Java. And HTML is not a programming language, it is a scripting language. __________________ "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis The ONLY sponsors we have are YOU! Please Donate!

08-25-2003, 12:23 PM	#11 (permalink)
bogosj13 Upright	Not to get technical... but HTML is a mark-up language, not scripting language. You can't perform any logic with HTML alone, you need to pair a scripting language like JavaScript or VBScript with it.

08-25-2003, 12:25 PM	#12 (permalink)
Lebell Cracking the Whip Location: Sexymama's arms...	I'm starting Java next week after taking Object Oriented Design and Analysis and C before that. For some odd reason, the University I attend teaches programming and data structures using Pascal. Go Figure. __________________ "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis The ONLY sponsors we have are YOU! Please Donate!

08-25-2003, 12:31 PM	#13 (permalink)
Antagony Psychopathic Akimbo Action Pirate Location: ...between Christ and Belial.	aahahahaha, Pascal ... I'm so sorry. Pascal was the first programming language I had to seriously undertake, but then Texas Education officially switched over to C++. __________________ On the outside I'm jazz, but my soul is rock and roll. Sleep is a waste of time. Join the Insomniac Club. "GYOH GWAH-DAH GREH BLAAA! SROH WIH DIH FLIH RYOHH!!" - The Locust

08-25-2003, 01:27 PM	#15 (permalink)
Zello Crazy Location: Vincennes, IN	-Ever-, I took a year of C++ in highschool. He taught us all the basics and then introduced us to making a game using the CDX engine. By the end of the year I was able to make a nice arcade shooting game. I didn't get around to adding sound or animations but I could have. BTW the address to the game is my homepage in profile. I would love to work on it but the source code was lost in a format. I don't have the patience to do that all over again. Also, I absolutly love programming. Everytime I solve a problem it feels great. Hope you enjoy it. As a side note, everyone says that you need to learn C before you learn C++. I don't even know what the difference is because as far as I know I've never used it. __________________ Sorry, you can not add yourself to your own list.

08-25-2003, 04:28 PM	#16 (permalink)
skinbag Registered User Location: Madison WI	Just curious..Do you folks program for fun or is it a good way to make a living?

08-25-2003, 05:20 PM	#18 (permalink)
Antagony Psychopathic Akimbo Action Pirate Location: ...between Christ and Belial.	For now I program for fun, although it is my course of study (Computer Science major). But two points: a.) I really don't do much programming for classes anymore. I'm past most of that. b.) I do lots of programming on my own time. My specialty is PHP. Although I've only done it for fun so far, I have a tech friend who is going to contract me out to code some for his company. So yeah, again it's both like dunkelhelmut. I'm not entirely sure that programming will be involved in my career path, but I will always keep the skills around and use them for "fun". __________________ On the outside I'm jazz, but my soul is rock and roll. Sleep is a waste of time. Join the Insomniac Club. "GYOH GWAH-DAH GREH BLAAA! SROH WIH DIH FLIH RYOHH!!" - The Locust

08-25-2003, 06:25 PM	#19 (permalink)
charliex Junkie Location: North Hollywood	I started coding because i was curious, typical scorpio, and i still do theres always something new to learn, puzzles to solve.. I'm actually less interested in the final product, more in the road taken, I rarely play any of the games i've written, and its only productivity tools that i've written that i frequently use. Most of the time I just do it to see if it can be done, like OpenGL in pure DOS for instance, though i was suprised to see how popular it was, and it did become the basis for linuxs first OpenGL support.

08-25-2003, 10:46 PM	#20 (permalink)
twister002 Crazy	My 'Love' of programming is based more out of necessity, which is the mother of aggrevation. I started out taking some LOGO and Pascal classes in elementary school on the Apple II's we had at the time. I moved on to the TI-994a and the programs in the back of Compute! magazine, I wanted to play some games and they were the best source. Then I moved on to the C=64, started out with some basic, then learned some machine language. I wanted to do cool things with my computer, make my games run a little faster, write some small database type applications, etc... Then there were the dark days of DOS, I uhmmmm, did lots of batch file programming. Ran a WWIV BBS and learned just enough C to be able to modify the source and customize my BBS. I went to college, my Biochem major didn't really call for a lot of programming. Except for VBA and VB programming in Excell, LOTS of that in research. I parlayed my VB knowledge into some positions after college. Picked up languages(Java, C++, PHP) and frameworks (JSP/servlets, ASP, VB COM) as needed and now I'm doing some C#, programming in ASP.NET. Really as I look back, I'm more of a frustrated game programmer, writing business programs and dynamic web sites pays the bills. I often wonder where I'd be today if I had learned more early on in the ZORK and Apogee days? So I've had absolutely no formal training in computer programming, yet most of the time when I join a new company or start a new project I end up as one of the more senior people on the project. So my advice to anyone wanting to become a programmer I think would just be "Program, a lot. Make mistakes, learn from them." I always tell someone whenever I give them a solution to their problem, usually one they never thought would work, that it just means I've screwed up in the same way twice already. Once someone told ME how to fix it, and the second time I had to try and remember what I did the first time. Last edited by twister002; 08-25-2003 at 10:50 PM..

08-26-2003, 07:31 AM	#21 (permalink)
kalisto_911 Psycho Location: Dreams	I have heard of 2 different styles of programming called Pearl and Assembly, how do you guys feel about these? __________________ I know not how I may seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with. [Plato]

08-26-2003, 07:45 AM	#22 (permalink)
TwoToTango Psycho	I'll second everything that's been said about programming being a creative endeavor, and tack on a couple of observations of my own. 1) I love debugging -- my code or others'. It's sleuthing at its most fascinating: subtle clues, carefully laid traps, street-smarts. Give me a bizarre crash that occurs apparently at random with no trace of recent mods in the likely area, and I'm in Sherlock Holmes heaven. 2) Computer programmers are like civil engineers who can, if they need to, change the laws of nature. Don't like gravity at 9.8 m/s/s? Change it! Need your structural steel to be nice and mushy when pushed along the X-axis but rigid otherwise? Invent it! The programmer's answer to every question of "Can you...?" is "Of course -- after all, it's only software." (Knowing how to set a price and schedule on "of course" is an entirely different matter.) 3) When you make something useful, the daily lives of other people are made better. That's quite satisfying. It is fun. I've been doing it for a living for more than 25 years. The cool thing is that people keep paying me

08-26-2003, 07:55 AM	#23 (permalink)
skinbag Registered User Location: Madison WI	Are you $ earners rare, or is there always work for a capable programmer?

08-26-2003, 08:20 AM	#25 (permalink)
Antagony Psychopathic Akimbo Action Pirate Location: ...between Christ and Belial.	kalisto_911, As Dave mentioned, those are programming languages. There are many many different languages. C, C++, C#, Pascal, Python, Perl, PHP ... the list goes on and on. __________________ On the outside I'm jazz, but my soul is rock and roll. Sleep is a waste of time. Join the Insomniac Club. "GYOH GWAH-DAH GREH BLAAA! SROH WIH DIH FLIH RYOHH!!" - The Locust

08-26-2003, 11:44 AM	#27 (permalink)
cheerios Banned Location: 'bout 2 feet from my iMac	graphics.. no thanks :P I'll stick w/ NOT fighting w/ GL and directX, thanks! skinbag: The market varies from place to place, in the states, anyway. California, which is where i am, is in a slump, but i've been told DC's got a lot of opportunities, as well as Louisiana. so... On the other hand, I know a couple alumni from my college who still come visit who are making some serious dough out here working for the govt. But, in general, things are a bit tight, market's a bit glutted. hopefully the economy will pick up and that'll change about when I graduate (god whole generations of coders are making that prayer right now!) So, it CAN be lucrative, but i wouldn't say you can ALWAYS find work, and what you find may not be what you want to do. As for why I code? 'cuz i can. well. and it's fun. languages: have to disagree w/ Lebell about learning something functional before something Object-Oriented. I started in C, also, but one isn't really any harder than the other, it's just another way of thinking about it. I learned: C C++/Perl/Obj-C (all around hte same time) Java and on my plate for this semester are at the least smalltalk and something scripting... python or ruby, maybe.

08-26-2003, 11:56 AM	#28 (permalink)
charliex Junkie Location: North Hollywood	Code: mox ah,9 mov dx,offset helloworld int 21 ret helloworld db 'Hello world$' simple asm example for msdos/x86 i feel very fortunate as i started off in asm , and i feel that if you learn asm you can pretty much get anywhere since although each chip has a different instruction set the ideas are the same. OO is a methodology, you learn about OO programming, its not about a particular language, just some languages are designed with it in mind, you can write OO in asm , C or pascal. I live in southern california, and the market here is probably the strongest around, i get daily calls from people looking for more good programmers.

08-26-2003, 09:42 PM	#29 (permalink)
poof Psycho	I had a psy120 class in the eighties tought by an instructor that declared that people involved heavily into computers where insecure around other people. He furthered that notion with his idea that programmers and other computer people where only happy in the world they were able to create for themselves where they were in total control. He gave our final grade by the average he had created on a spreadsheet.

08-27-2003, 09:35 AM	#31 (permalink)
TIO Addict Location: The Land Down Under	Everyone wonders why I do it: I bash my head against the pooter all day and all night, just to get one short bit of code working. None of them know how nice it is the first time your code runs perfectly __________________ Strewth

08-28-2003, 07:17 AM	#32 (permalink)
kalisto_911 Psycho Location: Dreams	Thanks for answering my questions. I wish there were more hours in the day, I might teach mysef programming if I had the time. __________________ I know not how I may seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with. [Plato]

08-28-2003, 10:39 AM	#33 (permalink)
irseg Junkie Location: Florida	Like the other people said, it's all about creating something from nothing and seeing it succeed. My best friend and I made a website together, he did the design/marketing and I did the programming. It is becoming VERY widely used and profitable. We're finding mention of it all over the place and the traffic is growing phenomenally. It's really fucking cool to see where it is now, and remember all those times we sat around at 4 in the morning all doped up on coffee and nicotine just talking and hashing it out. Seeing those ideas we threw around become reality, and then seeing that become successful is an incredible feeling.

08-29-2003, 02:01 PM	#37 (permalink)
rmarshall Addict Location: Kingston,Ontario	I remember in 1980 when I got my Apple ][ (standard) . I got it with 2 disk drives and the 16k language card. I was going to university at night studying Computer Science. We studied Pascal. I had UCSD Pascal on the Apple. I handed in printout from my Centronics 737 printer. The other students were in awe! I had been married for a year and was so involved in the computer, my wife would sit, naked, on the edge of the desk and I wouldn't notice. I still love computers, but if my girlfriend flashes a tit and says to come to bed, I don't love the computer that much.

08-29-2003, 05:44 PM	#38 (permalink)
jujueye alpaca lunch for the trip Location: in my computer	Feh....programming....well, you asked for it........ I really enjoyed programming when I did it for a living. It wasnt bad, really. The problem that drove me to another tech field was Microsoft. Yeah, go figure. In their effor to update their Visual Studio product, they continued to add more new features, and the learning curve went to nearly vertical. So, on top of keeping up on the latest cool code tricks, and the new operating systems, it was very necessary to keep up on the main tool used for development. That's where I jumped off and headed for far more stable ground. I totally enjoyed the whole creation aspect. From spec to Beta release, it was a blast. I just got so SO tired of reading documentation just to learn how to make a stupid Hello Useless World program.

08-29-2003, 07:46 PM	#39 (permalink)
viejo gringo Registered User Location: Deep South Texas	Worked for a Fotune 100 company for 38 years, ---20+ years of that writing code. Back then we coded in ANSI COBOL....and we didn't just write programs, we designed and built systems, with as many as 10 programms all connected by JCL (Job Control Language)....Yea, we were a strange lot---waking up in the middle of the night and finding a codeing sheet because you just figured out the logic for a whole program. One of our biggest accomplishments was designing and build a process into every program so that it never abended online, and have to get up in the middle of the night to fix it. we even built a system that eleminated all printed paper. Profitable?? Maybe not by todays standards, but $28 an hour plus all benifits payed seem great back then. The greatest thrill was building something that worked and not getting your hands dirty. The learning curve---well they put us through an intense 8 week coarse, and said "now you are one"--which I thought was pretty good since I never had a grade in math over a C in highschool. Mostly it was logic, just plain dumb logic. If you get into this field you must realize that you never stop learning--if you blink your eyes something new will pass you by...