Computer Programmers?

[toughmudderdave]

CS major here. My first job as a Software Engineer was writing in C and Assembly in a Dec Vax and PDP 11/70 environment. I then went on to porting code from the Macintosh platform to the PC platform for a company that produced character recognition software (Calera Recognition Systems). After 3 years of writing code I came to the conclusion that I hated it and switched to Network Engineering and never looked back. I love what I do.

 

[larry badiner]

i used to make those aol proggies (you can still find them online, just google aol progs) in visual basic 6.0 when i was 13, i moved on to linux and tinkered with a few programming languages, currently im doing some c# and plan to move on to visual c++.net

 

[burns1n209]

i used to make those aol proggies (you can still find them online, just google aol progs) in visual basic 6.0 when i was 13,

Me too, when i was a little guy i thought i was cool makin phishing apps, chatroom crap, and a whole bunch of AOL bullshit. Matter fact i was gonna ask if anyone still uses Visual Basic, if the company is still around, and if so its probably VB 37 or something. that was when we had the ol dial up days.

 

[KonradZuse]

It's funny, when I got my first programming job out of college I was too paranoid to talk about weed. Nobody there knew I got high or that I was getting started with my indoor gardening hobby. Maybe 3 years later, I slowly found out that more than half of my coworkers also liked getting high. A bunch of them were growing it too. I never would have guessed before that such a high percentage of the best programmers out there were closet potheads.

My dad told me "All real programmers get high." haha had to laugh at that one.

 

[gingerale]

When I was in 2nd grade I found a book in the school library about how to write programs in BASIC. I took it home and learned by keying in the example programs in the back on my dad's 286. That was great fun. A couple years later I learned C, then Pascal, x86 assembler, and all sorts of other languages over the years. I have kept with it mostly as a hobby rather than a serious pursuit, kinda keeping my eyes open for some sort of major coding project that would be worth putting a lot of effort into, and evaluating various languages to see their advantages and drawbacks. Within the past year I came up with the idea for a new type of programming language that is totally just going to blow everybody away when they see it. I'm still nowhere near having thought it out A to Z though, let alone started writing code, but besides growing tents full of weed that's what I'm working on. Oh yeah, and yes, smoking bud is what makes this all possible.

 

[Samporasa]

JAVA here

 

[minds_I]

Hello all,

Well, I first started programming fortran on PDP11 back in the late 70's/early 80's. moved on to assembly on 286, quickbasic/fortran.

I am a retired engineer and have not programmed in the newer object oriented programming such as c++ or visual basic.

So anyway, I have been meaning to integrate an arduino and 1-wire components for grow room control...much like growtronics. Just for kicks.

Anyway, I have been working on the hardware design...that is to say I have been hacking circuits to do the job and have simed a ec meter and pHmeter in multisim.

So, I have been looking at the arduino code and the visual basic code needed to further the project.

I am stymied by the syntax and the terms used.

Such as...class and forms..is it a program or a sub-program. and libraries--are they a collection of sub-routines or classes? does "public" mean "global" and likewise does "private" mean local?

The Boolean logic is easy enough to follow.

Its like writing a program to call sub routines which further call subroutines that futher still call sub-routines. Thus having to know what the sub routine wants and produces in advance.

Not at all like top down process oriented programming...which I am accustomed to

It is very confusing especially when I am stoned. I am not at all used to this and I can tell it is going to take some time to accomplish.

I have even thought about taking a class at the local JC but this JC is very small and does not offer the class.

minds_I

 

[larry badiner]

I know a few programming languages, since I'm high off some good wax I might as well talk about pointers:

Here is a basic C program, I'll explain it after I type it

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main()
{
int *ptr;
ptr = malloc(sizeof(int));
printf("This is the value of *ptr %d", *ptr);
return 0;
}

What that function does is declare the main starting point for the program. Main (and winMain for Win32) are where all code starts to be executed on the host computer. int is a type, it stands for integer and on a 32 bit host (most common cpu) its range is I think -~65000-+65000 (give or take). The text infront of that is the name of the variable.

Now heres the difficult part of that function, or atleast I like to imagine it is - int *ptr declares an empty pointer which is set somewhere in I think the stack, and with the malloc() function (which should be on 90% of all OS's that support C) along with the sizeof() function, it basically allocates the size of int (which is 4 on a 32 bit machine) to that pointer, and creates a normal variable, which can be used as long as its dereferenced. (look it up!)

Then printf() prints it out, and we return 0 which tells the operating system that its done its code successfully and exits.

Another way to declare a pointer is like this: int x, *ptr;

which basically means point *ptr to the value of x.

Also, if you want to assign the memory address to a pointer (which is good for complex things, I haven't really gotten that far) you would do:

int x;
int *ptr;
*ptr = &x;

which basically says point ptr to x.

I'll try to explain pointer to functions later