Maximum PC

Real men program in C

Ok they have been making the same promise of COBOL for years now that the next version will be OOP completely also. Yea right.

I am currently going for a Bachelors in CIS from Baker College Online (www.baker.edu). Through them I have taken classes in Java, C++, RPG IV. And I will be taking Perl next semester.

Haha... actually, the children of real men program in C. And now we're the grand-children programming increasingly complex systems, and we will pretty soon have our own children, who will program even more complex systems than we accomplished using MDA's. And it wasn't all that long ago that our great grandparents coded directly in machine language using switches! They were mostly women though. So much for us guys and C.

C was great in its day, but structured programming is soooooo 1970s.

Not a programmer by any stretch of the immagination here, however like to mess with VB 6.0 and VB .NET as time allows. I have the entire Visual Studio .NET package and in time may learn a little.

Nice to see this folder!

Ron

Welcome Ron! We're all happy to help ya in your quest to learn.

Right now its VB6, 'cos it's close enought to the stuff i did in grade school to get back into the swing and get a basic handle on OOP...

lol. I can concede that the arrangement of functions in the string library don't all belong. Globabl variables are no longer on by default and yes switching back and forth between scripting and markup can get confusing. I would be glad to provide php based solutions to some of these questions. I have never done an ACM or TC problem though.

If I didn't know better I would think this was an alt of mine or something.

My programming days are long gone, although I have thought if I can ever find the time, I'd like to get back into it.

My personal favourite? Pascal.
Then again, Fortran had it's appeal - I guess you never really forget your first language lesson, even if it was all batch processing and you had to sit at a punch desk endlessly punching cards, then feeding them through the card reader and hoping it wouldn't jam and mess things up.

Cobol was bewildering, by the time I hit Cobol I already knew most of Fortran and Pascal and kept asking myself why Cobol wanted things THIS way instead of a much easier, cleaner and sensible THAT way.

BASIC, oh man, I loved fooling around with BASIC. But that is just the point. Fooling around. I never tried to do anything serious with Basic, but it was good for a first cut solution if you weren't too sure how you wanted to solve a specific problem.

Assembly code was sort of like Basic, only more so. Great for solving small problems, but the only large project I undertook never made it past the broad outline.

I was just getting into C when I was forced to abandon university studies. It looked like a fairly interesting language.

Then along came the first PCs, Commodore V20/c64, an early Mac and AMIGA.

Sorry, I tend to ramble as most old fogeys do.

Please ramble.... I was enjoying it. Hearing old fogeys tell their tales is a nice break from the grind.

You'll be pleased to hear that Pascal is still a popular choice among some of the Eastern European and Asian universities at the ACM International Programming Contest (but will be dropped in 2006).

For some reason, people are still 'fooling around' with BASIC. I learned it in 6th grade and unlearned it in college. There really should be an international law banning the use and teaching of it - what the hell does the UN do anyways? I've converted several BASIC programs published in Sky & Telescope to Java. You have to wonder about these BASIC folks. I think there is some rule that all vars must be one capital letter and used with at least two data types. For some reason, old BASIC programmers are still programming in BASIC. They won't move on. After coming across a great repository of crypto programs written in BASIC, I've decided that I'll have to write a 'source code translator' to convert them into Java (I really don't know what to call it). I figure I can automate 80% of it fairly easily with the exception of the GOSUBS - modularity is just not a concept in this language.

Well, I guess I've ranted long enough as well - hey, thanks for stopping by.

Yes, I think so too...it really depends on what you're trying to do; my personal belief goes something like this: "For every 'thing' there is a language that does 'it' better than C++; C++ just is 'in the middle' enough that it can be used for everything." That's why I like it, no need to dig up references for obscure and underused (but still good) languages.

Glad to see someone new around....

So tell us a bit about yourself..... student? if so, where? professional? etc.

Meh...I'm not really anything. This is my hobby, but it's an all consuming hobby. Seriously, I have one friend, because when other people are playing games or writing 'essays' at school, I find loopholes in security. He also does programming, but in Java. So far my 'most problems spotted' count is 7.

I want to become a CS major and some sort of engineering major.

Of course, I also plan to do this as a job, because as everyone knows: "Hackers do for love what others wouldn't do for money."

That's about it.

C and Java.

Java.

Damn... the last few guys didn't get to vote... did you?

#1. PHP/Javascript
#5. C/VB
#3. QB
#5. C++/HLSL/GLSL

Perl is great! So many modules!