I remember myself, back in the day i was a fool.
I didn't had patience, i never read manuals, i could not appretiate beauty.
While suffering from chronic insomnia, a friend msg's me about a good C book.
And it happends. i start reading that C book @ the nights i could not sleep, i took advantage of my insomnia.
My whole life changed after that.
I read manuals, rfcs, file formats and protocols.
I read about memory, processors, filesystems, bootloaders
I suddenly became a knowledge freak.
Learned lisp and then Haskell (i owe that to /prog/ btw.)
Also, i started learning mathematics and physics.
And to imagine, all that started (and still is) as a hobby!
I started juggling early in the mornings (like 6 am) and generally exercising.
I participate in many open-source projects and i teach programming/mathematics/physics to many people i know in real life OR over the internet
Sure, i still have a shitjob; I still have no girlfriend due to being closed to myself and very anti social, but programming gave value to my life, and gave an end to those endless nights.
>>1
I can't really think about it like that. I've been programming since I was 8 or 9. I only had a two-year break during my middle teens when I had an angsty ``computers are crap'' phase.
SICP changed my life as a programmer, though. I wish I had read it 10 years earlier instead of wasting almost a decade with C++.
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Anonymous2007-08-16 6:27 ID:x7tP82w6
>>13 oh really? so which language do you use now? I call BS.
>>16
``.. some stay dry and others feel the pain ..''
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Anonymous2007-08-16 6:40 ID:x7tP82w6
>>15 are you saying that reading SICP helped you in C, a language that isn't exactly supportive of functional programming?
Anyway undo my BS, you gain respect for using python and I'm not even going to mention...
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Anonymous2007-08-16 6:46 ID:1B+DX1Xc
one word. the forced indentation of the code. thread over
>>18
reading SICP and learning Lisp in general has made me about 1000x better at C programming, no joke
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Anonymous2007-08-16 9:52 ID:qGj5qZ0S
>>18
reading Burger Menus and learning HTML in general has made me about 1000x better at PHP programming, no joke
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Anonymous2007-08-16 11:27 ID:x7tP82w6
Programming has changed my life. I used to be a successful electrician, I had friends, a house and all my hair. Even since I learned c++ my life has gone downhill.
Long story short, I now live in my mothers basement, overweight, bald and no friends. I have health problems, B.O. and I haven't had sex in 6 years.
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Anonymous2007-08-16 11:33 ID:x7tP82w6
>>24 here.
I also started juggling early in the mornings (like 6 am).
That's the worst thing about it, I don't even like juggling.
I've never had a life that didn't involve programming. I'm serious here -- wrote my first shitty text adventure in C64 basic before puberty... at eight or nine years old or so.
Now, I'm the kind who switches programming languages like they were pants. I'll find myself going "hmm... didn't I write this function before?" and then realize that it was Perl, or Haskell, rather than the C I've got before me.
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Anonymous2007-08-17 5:34 ID:00mTLbF8
10 POKE53280,0:POKE53281,0:PRINT CHR$(147)
20 PRINT"SHITTY TEXT ADVENTURE."
30 PRINT"YOU ARE IN A ROOM."
40 INPUT"DO WHAT";A$
41 IF A$="KILL YOURSELF" THEN 59
50 PRINT"YOU ARE SUICIDAL AND THE ONLY THING YOU CAN DO IS KILL YOURSELF."
58 PRINT"ANYWAY YOU ARE NOT DOING ";A$:".":GOTO 40
59 PRINT"YOU HAVE KILLED YOURSELF.":PRINT"CONGRATURATION!!!!!!"
60 SYS64738
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Anonymous2007-08-17 6:31 ID:XV8uZzHQ
I have actually degraded as a programmer since I was like six years old.
Back then, I would actually FINISH the programs I write. Nowadays, all I do is start new projects and let the older ones rot until interest returns. After a few cycles I'll declare the project dead and delete it.
Of course, part is that I wrote easier programs when I was young, if there's something easy I want now, I'll just use something someone else wrote before me, or hack up a oneliner in zsh.