First i spent years of my childhood typing in BASIC programs from magazines, then modifying them, then finally writing my own games.
Later I attended university, and during my 5 years of Computer Science education I learnt Java, C, SQL, and constructed several large and complicated systems.
>>3
This. My first experience with code written(or entirely typed) not by my was hacking some ZS Spectrum game(King of Grain? Grain King?).
I very quickly learned that changing
2000 PRINT "you have ";g;" tons of grain"
to
2000 PRINT "you have ";g;"000 tons of grain"
doesn't give me more grain that I had. My second attempt (1999 LET G = G*1000) was more succesful.
Then there was Quake 1 with QuakeC, where I learned how to work with bit masks. Only then SICP, Code Complete, etc.
Beside that I coded a lot. Almost every fucking day. I still remember that `int 33h` works with mouse. FUCK. Get this knowledge out of my head.
Also reading code written by others helps. REALLY helps.
Name:
Anonymous2010-05-18 10:59
I started off by coding in Python, reading some code in C++ and I'm currently reading about Common Lisp.
I still don't know shit about programming. Or well... I'm still a beginner at programming.
Name:
Anonymous2010-05-18 11:05
A good tip:
If your compiler/interpreter doesn't give you errors in the beginning of your studying, then you're doing it wrong.
Also having no bugs is doing it wrong.
>>9
Usually bugcount decreases as you know what you're doing, until it's reasonably low and only obscure/non-obvious bugs happen.
Name:
Anonymous2010-05-18 11:18
>>10
Yes, of course I was talking about the beginning of your studying as then you are most likely just copying code / writing really simple code and not trying to challenge yourself.
Name:
Anonymous2010-05-18 11:38
I first wanted to learn c++ like, everyone on the internet told me to(fucking assholes) but strugling with OOP i failed.
Then i went on to C, only to learn that C stdlib sucks more cocks than my sister on fridays.
Having a little knowledge in reverse engineering i turned to ASM, searching and searching for libraries that dont suck i was fustrated again, Attempting to build my own failed due to my little knowledge of OSes.
One day i stumbled upon perl whose feature rich library i could exploit to the fullest. I then came to learn about its unix nature and linux and have been using linux ever since.
Making bigger and bigger scripts which turned into programs one day i have atained knowledge, combining it with the unix like nature slackware i also learned many things about unix, linux and computers in general.
Being to stupid to read trough SICP and its excercises, i have simply watched the video lectures and even doing it only half assed i have still learned many things about lisp.
It was then that one day i required a GUI, knowing that the sucked all, my path led me to Emacs and its lisp nature.
>>14
Single-dispatch OOP as defined in Java, C# are rather limited forms of OOP and they force you to shoehorn various problems that can be solved much more simpler given a more appropriate set of tools. While OOP itself is simple, being forced to deal with it when it's absolutely unneeded for a problem is annoying and having to deal with its quirks is also annoying. When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...
Name:
Anonymous2010-05-18 13:24
>>12
I'm sure your sister is a very nice lady. You're just envious that she has more friends.
>>20
Last I checked Larry Wall didn't care (though that changes every 2 years I estimate... he's still into chartreuse though), but I can't help but notice that a Perl REPL would be perl (or perl-repl, or perlrepl, or more likely something stupid like replerl) but not "Perl".
>>16
I was 14 when I tried C++ too, and I didn't have any problems understanding OOP. Your excuse is invalid.
Name:
Anonymous2010-05-18 15:58
I first learned BASIC in 4th grade. We made simple "Press a button: you pressed the button A" programs.
Someone donated a bunch of apple ]['s to my second middle school. I used BASIC to run a simple program that made the screen turn blue and print out "PROJECT BLUE BOOK : FOR INTERNAL GOVERNMENT USE ONLY" when you ran the program. Pressing ENTER would bring up a page of gibberish that looked like the stuff flowing down the mainframe columns on the move Hackers (which was still recent if I remember correctly.) I used it to fool this kid that was at the time really into UFO's.
After that I was hooked. I played around with editing games on a Tandy 1000 I got from my uncle.
In HS, it was all C++. After that, Almost nothing but C until I finished University. (Aside from learning LISP, Scheme, etc in various other classes as toy languages)
>>27
Very good, I happen to know that the 'now' in that refers to some time at least 10 years passed.
Name:
Anonymous2010-05-18 17:03
My first real programming experience, apart from some TI-BASIC on my calculator in high school, was making an online game in PHP to impress some girl when I was at university (majoring in some unrelated subject). Then I dropped out and switched to CS at some other college, where I was taught Java and COBOL.
That angered me to the extent that I went looking for better languages myself, so I watched the SICP video lectures and bought a copy of the book and read that and played around with Scheme. Then I tried Sepples for a bit, which turned out to be a horrible mistake.
Eventually I moved on to Python, Haskell, and C, all of which made programming as much fun as I initially thought it should be. And when something is fun to do, you'll find applications for it somehow, and those applications will give you a deeper understanding of what you're doing. It's a nice virtuous cycle.
Lately I've been trying to get into Prolog, but that's looking like more effort than it's worth. Understanding how Prolog is implemented is a great lesson in automated reasoning algorithms, but actually using Prolog is usually pointless.