Any Programmers in the House?

[Debater Slayer]

So... who are RF's resident programmers or programmers in the making, and which programming language(s) do you know? Programming as a part-time job or even as a personal pursuit outside your primary work counts as well.

I'm currently learning C++. This is the most basic course of my degree, which should make me eligible to work as a full-time software developer. I'm also looking into Java at the moment. With any luck I'll be able to manipulate RF's code to make myself RF Overlord.

 

[MD]

I learned C+, Visual basic, Java and pascal in high school and college.

I hated it all, lol. But I could probably could get back into coding if I tried, with some time.

 

[Debater Slayer]

I learned C+, Visual basic, Java and pascal in high school and college.

I hated it all, lol. But I could probably could get back into coding if I tried, with some time.

That sounds extensive for a non-specialized course. Why did your courses include so much programming?

 

[MD]

Why did your courses include so much programming?

In high school you can take programming in Canada from grade 10.

I learned Pascal in Grade 10, VB in Grade 11 and C plus in Grade 12. In college I took Java before realizing I hated programming. Here professional degrees are post graduate rather than undergrad, my undergrad was in neuroscience and initially I thought I wanted to do computational neuroscience.

 

[icehorse]

I'm currently learning C++. This is the most basic course of my degree, which should make me eligible to work as a full-time software developer. I'm also looking into Java at the moment.

Long time software developer here, welcome aboard!

At this point C++ seems a bit of an odd choice. It's an okay language, but if your goal is to get a job as a programmer, I'd say that Java, C#, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Python would all be somewhat better choices. Do you have any sense of what kind of programming you want to do? If you're sincere about web programming, then most websites run on JavaScript, HTML and CSS. If you'd rather work on the server side of things, that's when Java and C# are probably the most popular. If you want to use programming to support your scientific or engineering pursuits then Python is popular.

These days C++ is mostly used by really advanced programmers to do really complex programs, e.g. high-end graphically intense games, or situations where you need to get ultra high performance for specialized hardware.

Of course you can learn all the computer science basics with C++, but you can with Java, C#, and Python as well.

 

[MD]

Long time software developer here, welcome aboard!

At this point C++ seems a bit of an odd choice. It's an okay language, but if your goal is to get a job as a programmer, I'd say that Java, C#, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Python would all be somewhat better choices. Do you have any sense of what kind of programming you want to do? If you're sincere about web programming, then most websites run on JavaScript, HTML and CSS. If you'd rather work on the server side of things, that's when Java and C# are probably the most popular. If you want to use programming to support your scientific or engineering pursuits then Python is popular.

These days C++ is mostly used by really advanced programmers to do really complex programs, e.g. high-end graphically intense games, or situations where you need to get ultra high performance for specialized hardware.

Of course you can learn all the computer science basics with C++, but you can with Java, C#, and Python as well.

How bout dat Pascal yo?

 

[Debater Slayer]

In high school you can take programming in Canada from grade 10.

I learned Pascal in Grade 10, VB in Grade 11 and C plus in Grade 12. In college I took Java before realizing I hated programming. Here professional degrees are post graduate rather than undergrad, my undergrad was in neuroscience and initially I thought I wanted to do computational neuroscience.

Have you found any use for the programming languages you've learned?

 

[MD]

Have you found any use for the programming languages you've learned?

Aside from debating techno optimists with Kurzweilian wet dreams?

It does provide personal insight into understanding how the brain works on some level, but overall not really. It has very little application in my field. It's also been a decade since I've worked with code so I've forgotten a lot of it by now.

 

[Debater Slayer]

Long time software developer here, welcome aboard!

Thanks!

At this point C++ seems a bit of an odd choice. It's an okay language, but if your goal is to get a job as a programmer, I'd say that Java, C#, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Python would all be somewhat better choices. Do you have any sense of what kind of programming you want to do? If you're sincere about web programming, then most websites run on JavaScript, HTML and CSS. If you'd rather work on the server side of things, that's when Java and C# are probably the most popular. If you want to use programming to support your scientific or engineering pursuits then Python is popular.

These days C++ is mostly used by really advanced programmers to do really complex programs, e.g. high-end graphically intense games, or situations where you need to get ultra high performance for specialized hardware.

Of course you can learn all the computer science basics with C++, but you can with Java, C#, and Python as well.

I still haven't decided exactly which field I'm going to focus on, and it is a given that C++ is not the only language I'm going to master. Staying competitive will probably require me to learn and be proficient at a minimum of three or four (and that's just a guess; maybe I'll need more).

Which aspects of software development do you focus on, if you don't mind my asking?

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Since the 70's, I have programmed in Fortran, Cobol, PL1, PLC7, RPG, Pascal, Lisp, Prolog, MProlog, Basic, VBA, Assembler, and other more obscure languages.

As you can see from the list, that makes me a veritable antique.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

By the way, I could also "programmatically wire the backplane" of an old IBM punch card sorter. As if you kiddies even knew such a thing existed way back then...

 

[LuisDantas]

Back in the 1980s and 1990s I used to program a fair bit in what are now mostly obsolete languages, many of them interpreted.

The most significant was probably 6502 machine code, but I did a fair bit of Dbase III/Clipper as well. Some Pascal and lots of interpreted BASIC too.

 

[icehorse]

How bout dat Pascal yo?

Nothing wrong with Pascal, it's just sort of gone out of style. If I recall correctly it's tough to do OO with Pascal, and OO has been pretty dominant lately.

 

[Eliab ben Benjamin]

RISC-OS , BBC Basic, C++ , DOS ..

 

[icehorse]

Thanks!

I still haven't decided exactly which field I'm going to focus on, and it is a given that C++ is not the only language I'm going to master. Staying competitive will probably require me to learn and be proficient at a minimum of three or four (and that's just a guess; maybe I'll need more).

Which aspects of software development do you focus on, if you don't mind my asking?

My focus was using AI to do interesting scheduling problems. We did scheduling for railroads, broadcasting, and manufacturing. These days I teach computer geeks to teach their technologies so I get a nice overview of most of the cool and new programming languages and frameworks like Akka and Angular and Tensorflow and Clojure and on and on.

If you plan on learning 3-ish languages C++ is okay for one of them. It's a "C-family" language so it'll make learning C, Java, C# and Python that much easier. I'm not a fan of JavaScript - it was literally thrown together in a couple of weeks and it's got a lot of flaws - but it's friggin everywhere so it's one you ought to learn. I do think object oriented programming is still extremely common so you should add Java or C#. I lean towards Java, but they're very similar.

 

[MD]

Nothing wrong with Pascal, it's just sort of gone out of style. If I recall correctly it's tough to do OO with Pascal, and OO has been pretty dominant lately.

I heard there were massive riots and protests against the language cuz it's named after a European male and thus racist, sexist, misogynistic and islamophobic (cuz of Pascals wager).

 

[icehorse]

I gotta say a bit more about OO:

Your teacher will probably say that C++ is an OO language, and it is - kind of. The inventor of OO, Alan Kay, famously said: "I'm the guy that invented OO, and I can tell you that I didn't have C++ in mind"

Most modern languages are OO to a degree. Very few are PURE OO - Smalltalk is one that is. The most popular OO languages these days are "mostly" OO (Java, C#). JavaScript and Python can be OO, but they're not naturally as OO as Java and C#.

Is that confusing enough?

 

[Father Heathen]

Used to make games in Qbasic in ancient times. Long since forgot how to do any of it.

 

[idav]

So... who are RF's resident programmers or programmers in the making, and which programming language(s) do you know? Programming as a part-time job or even as a personal pursuit outside your primary work counts as well.

I'm currently learning C++. This is the most basic course of my degree, which should make me eligible to work as a full-time software developer. I'm also looking into Java at the moment. With any luck I'll be able to manipulate RF's code to make myself RF Overlord.

I know php pretty well using it a lot in work and have been having to delve into C++ and LUA heavily. I learned a lot of Python as well using for Machine Learning, also for work. Thats pretty much all I work on these days for my job, programming for multiple websites and triple A games, not as much computer tech stuff. C++ is pretty good if you want to do AAA games, Unreal, Unity etc and a lot of them use LUA also which kinda looks a lot like Python to me. I think I need more Javascript which is helpful in some of our projects, but have done a few things in it. For years I've done a tons of SQL scripting, sure has been helpful with PHP. Gosh I even had to do some C# in recent weeks but really just beginning in that.

 

[Brickjectivity]

I took Pascal in high school followed by some self taught VBA and C, however I did not become a programmer. Years later I learned shell with BASH. I'm studying some Python code currently (at the moment studying a parser called lib2to3 that converts Python 2 code to Python version 3 ). I plan to learn to develop with C and Python together. I'm drawn to whatever seems easiest balanced with whatever has the greatest utility, something that will let me use both system level routines and high level programs. Despite appearances I am not interested in learning multiple programming languages. I'm looking for the language that will be my last programming language and that will swallow most other programming languages (but not all. There must always be special purpose programming languages.).