geekhack
geekhack Community => Off Topic => Topic started by: bueller on Fri, 16 August 2013, 23:45:19
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Always interested to talk shop with other programmers, I'm currently being mentored by a local developer and will be transitioning from desktop support to full time coding in the next year or so. Working on some Primavera stuff in Java at the moment, anyone else got any projects on the go?
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I am employed as a programmer, more or less. Mostly Delphi (don't laugh), Python and Java.
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Currently a CS student, and I love programing. ;)
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former CS student. changed my major to take over the family business and i regent it all the time. :(
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I actually studied CS about a decade ago but found it to be horribly boring on the programming side of things, for some reason now that I'm learning Java I'm really enjoying myself!
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Here! I am sure that there are lots of other programmers around here. We care about keyboards because we use them a lot.
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Here! I am sure that there are lots of other programmers around here. We care about keyboards because we use them a lot.
not all of us (I mean programmers :) )
I don't know any other programmers in person that use mechanical keyboards)
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Full time dev here. I also hack on some personal projects in my (limited) spare time.
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I'm a web developer at a start up company.
I maintain a bunch of Rails websites for the most part. I've been playing around with Go language recently in my free time. I really want to jump into Java at some point too though.
Congrats on the transition! I'm always up for talking shop/code too. I'm usually always on skype or gtalk.
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Wouldn't mind learning one of these days. I know bits and pieces of code for various things from tinkering, but nothing full blown. My problem in regards to learning has always been in the aspect of a purpose. I have nothing to make, therefore no language to investigate, and no functions and problems to learn and overcome.
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Wouldn't mind learning one of these days. I know bits and pieces of code for various things from tinkering, but nothing full blown. My problem in regards to learning has always been in the aspect of a purpose. I have nothing to make, therefore no language to investigate, and no functions and problems to learn and overcome.
So just create a goal for yourself:) or you can join some github open source project.
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I'm a web developer at a start up company.
What kind of startup it is? (if it's not a secret)
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I'm a web developer at a start up company.
What kind of startup it is? (if it's not a secret)
A marketing company hired my company hello codes (which is just me) to build out websites for their clients. Their clients are small businesses who want to grow.
It pays the bills usually. I'm trying to do my own thing on the side though.
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Full time developer for Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow)
Most of the guys I work with either have Ducky Shines or Das Keyboards.
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I am a full time developper. I was mainly coding Foxpro (yea yea sucks but I had to) and now transitionning (again) to .NET (CS). I am also doing a lot of SQL with MSSQL and I aim to become a DBA in the next year(s).
I work for a small company in the Healthcare industry. I develop a software to manage the emergencies (the hospital department) and we also develop another software that does some performance analysis based on the data from the main systems in an hospital.
Quite fun job!
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Full time developer for Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow)
Most of the guys I work with either have Ducky Shines or Das Keyboards.
That is awesome! I use the site daily, I need to be more active and vote/comment more.
How do you like working there?
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Best job I've ever had. They know how to take care of devs :-D
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I'm attempting to learn programming, but I'm utterly inept at it.
I'll get there eventually, I've just got to find the right way to learn.
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Start a small project, something easy. Something you would use.
Add to it everyday.
If you can't think of anything, try writing a program that will create a function block in your chosen language.
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Full time developer for Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow)
Most of the guys I work with either have Ducky Shines or Das Keyboards.
Nice...
I've never had a good experience on SE, but that's because I'm a total Java noob.
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I am employed as a programmer, more or less. Mostly Delphi (don't laugh), Python and Java.
I'm not laughing; Delphi/Object-Pascal is one of the most beautiful looking programming languages I've ever seen. IMHO C++/Java look hideous in comparison.
I'm currently doing T-SQL/SQL Server/SSIS for ETL/Data Mining/Reporting. I would like to transition into UI developer stuff but there is so much to know that I have no idea where to start. There are so many kids doing solid work in their teen's I have no idea how I could compete with them...
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I develop tools for technical artists and animators in C++ and Python. There are a few mech users at my workplace. A few I have converted and a few have gotten into it on their own. And we have a lot of engineers who use Kineses for ergo reasons without being aware of the superior key action (I was in this category for a year or two before I got into keyboards).
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I am employed as a programmer, more or less. Mostly Delphi (don't laugh), Python and Java.
I'm not laughing; Delphi/Object-Pascal is one of the most beautiful looking programming languages I've ever seen. IMHO C++/Java look hideous in comparison.
I'm currently doing T-SQL/SQL Server/SSIS for ETL/Data Mining/Reporting. I would like to transition into UI developer stuff but there is so much to know that I have no idea where to start. There are so many kids doing solid work in their teen's I have no idea how I could compete with them...
Delphi/Object Pascal seems to just about stay in the top 20 [/url-http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html]Tiobe Index[/url].
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Full time developer for Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow)
got a new job recently?
i'm a lead developer for a social project backed by one of russia's richest biilionaires. creating anti-corruption / anti-fraud / pro-honesty community to help develop people's everyday life and make communication with authorities easier.
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I am not strictly a programmer, my official title is technical analyst. My duties look a lot more like a system administrator, but I do write a lot of code in languages like perl, shell (sh, ksh, bash, etc). I also do some programming and scripting on the windows side with C#.Net, Powershell, vbscript, and DOS batch. My primary duties are managing an enterprise scale monitoring environment for our operations team (HP Operations Manager suite).
I have been interested in programming since I started getting into computers at age 12. I try to keep my knowledge up there, but it's difficult without any real projects to keep it going. These days the only programming practice I get is through the scripts that I write on a regular basis for work.
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I'm the Lead Computer Engineer (still not sure what this actually means lol) for a international VoIP company, in practice I do a lot of debugging and non-repetitive SYSADM work (basically setting up the environments that need to be replicated by the actual SYSOPS) but I spend most of my time designing/coding mission critical systems in C, Erlang and Python and dealing with scale issues (specially lately). I always wanted to work with games development but ended up in telecom, luckily I flipping love my job :))
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got a new job recently?
April 1st
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Software Engineer for a big healthcare solutions company based in Kansas City. A big company but for some reason though I am known as the keyboard guy around my cube space
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got a new job recently?
April 1st
a "new job"?
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Software Engineer for a big healthcare solutions company based in Kansas City. A big company but for some reason though I am known as the keyboard guy around my cube space
If you work where I'm pretty sure you do, a guy I work with interviewed out there recently. He said it seems like a really cool company to work for. I'm a developer for a "medium" healthcare solutions company :)
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I'm a CS student. I should program.
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a "new job"?
?? I'm confused now :(
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no just old nap
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C#, F#, C++, Objective-C for work. Erlang, Perl when at home if I get the urge to code on my own which doesn't happen much these days.
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I am a young programmer, only a mid-teens teenager and love Java. Would love to take CS in College.
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I am a CS student with a concentration in Computer Networking but I program at my current job and also design websites. C++, Java, and VB are the languages I use at work and home depending on what I'm trying to do.
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IT student here, I do code for fun and I have to do a pretty nice project in JavaFX. Mainly I've messed with Java (thus wanting to code in JavaFX), but I also have a bit of experience with C#.
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Back in high school I worked part time at Norton (Antivirus) during Jr and Senior Year :D.
As with most antivirus, there must be hate around :(
But I work with ring0 rootkits, Unix code mostly :) UDP/TCP connections and the likes..
I suck at Java and know my way around C++
Sadly I'm now Premed :(
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I am a CS student, going into my second year and I love programming :p
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CS major that dropped out to enlist. I just really hated java, now I do some sysadmin work with occasional scripting
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Bums me out that Java is such a staple in CS courses. There are so many better languages out there.
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I am a front-end PHP developer.
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Bums me out that Java is such a staple in CS courses. There are so many better languages out there.
(http://www.cute-factor.com/images/smilies/onion/088.gif)
It's about ubiquity though.. hrmm....
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Bums me out that Java is such a staple in CS courses. There are so many better languages out there.
Joel Spolsky better or more practical better? Given your employer I guess it could both ;-)
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I'm a web and iOS developer. Just got a new gig where I'll get to do some Android development as well. It'll be fun :)
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I'm also a CS student and I had the luck of having Java only in one course :p
I love programming and that's probably the reason for my keyboard addiction ;D
Most of the time I program in C++ or Python, but I love to try new languages! Go is next on the list.
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C#, F#, C++, Objective-C for work.
I'm so, so sorry
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Joel Spolsky better or more practical better? Given your employer I guess it could both ;-)
I've disliked Java for a long, long time. Ruby as well. But then again, one of my areas of interest is language design and compiler theory, so I'm kind of a purist.
Now, the Java runtime.. that's a pretty slick piece of software, and some great languages have been built on top of it. But Java itself just feels half-finished.
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Joel Spolsky better or more practical better? Given your employer I guess it could both ;-)
I've disliked Java for a long, long time. Ruby as well. But then again, one of my areas of interest is language design and compiler theory, so I'm kind of a purist.
Now, the Java runtime.. that's a pretty slick piece of software, and some great languages have been built on top of it. But Java itself just feels half-finished.
And what do you consider a great language and why?
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The two off the top of my head that I've really liked are Python and F#. From a language standpoint, I really like Python's consistency. Sure it's got it's quirks (all practical languages do), but for the most part it's remarkably consistent.
F# I really like mainly because of it's brevity and clarity (this actually holds true for most ML based languages). The code is remarkably succinct, yet maintains expressiveness and readability.
Both languages have a seriously minimal amount of noise (extraneous characters and constructs like curly braces or begin/end blocks). I really, really like indentation for scope delineation, as it makes the language eminently readable with very small amounts of deviation from one programmer to another, since basic formatting style is enforced at the language level.
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a "new job"?
?? I'm confused now :(
hahaha
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a "new job"?
?? I'm confused now :(
April 1st
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Yea after they gave me my start date I checked with them a few times to make sure they weren't pulling an April Fool's joke on me.
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C#, F#, C++, Objective-C for work.
I'm so, so sorry
Honestly it is a nice change of scenery when anything iOS actually comes up. I spend the majority of mine time split between XAML C# desktop apps for windows and C++ stuff for the cluster. When I am feeling annoyed with anything I am working on, I just remind myself that at least it isn't Scheme (school).
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C#, F#, C++, Objective-C for work.
I'm so, so sorry
C isn't supposed to be objective. And Apple shouldn't make their own languages.
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I've been a developer as a job for 20 years... eek... and longer than that as a hobby.
Currently doing C#, Objective-C, SQL and PHP in Santa Clara area south of San Francisco.
Have done projects in Java, Groovy, Python, Z80, 6502, 8080, C, C++, Delphi... COBOL ahem.
[)amien
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C isn't supposed to be objective. And Apple shouldn't make their own languages.
Apple didn't make Objective-C although they did add support for it to GCC and base their tools around it.
[)amien
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The capabilities of Objective-C are actually pretty cool. The language itself is just so...ugly
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CS/Mathematics undergrad working at GitHub.com. All CS Programs are terribad unless you actually want to know theory or hope to work at a stuffy, momentum-driven company like IBM, Google, or Microsoft your time is better spent teaching yourself and actually working on toy projects. I've learned a whole lot more making and breaking stuff than class has ever taught me. It would probably help if my school had a decent CS program.
Ruby is my bread and butter and has been for the last few years. I have a fondness for Lua, C, and 6502 assembly. Go, Rust, and Volt all seem promising but each has stupid flaws.
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scheme is wonderful!
and cs / math education starts working for a programmer when he moves from "toy projects" to creating serious things.
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CS/Mathematics undergrad working at GitHub.com. All CS Programs are terribad unless you actually want to know theory or hope to work at a stuffy, momentum-driven company like IBM, Google, or Microsoft your time is better spent teaching yourself and actually working on toy projects. I've learned a whole lot more making and breaking stuff than class has ever taught me. It would probably help if my school had a decent CS program.
Ruby is my bread and butter and has been for the last few years. I have a fondness for Lua, C, and 6502 assembly. Go, Rust, and Volt all seem promising but each has stupid flaws.
You stole our designer.....this means war!!!
J/k... <3
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The capabilities of Objective-C are actually pretty cool. The language itself is just so...ugly
It's not just the ugliness of all those square brackets - it's the fact that before you can start writing a line you have to know how many messages you'll send or be prepared to move the cursor back and forth as you figure it out. e.g.
NSArray *subviews = [[[[UIApplication sharedApplication] valueForKey:@"statusBar"] valueForKey:@"foregroundView"]subviews];
[)amien
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Wow... didn't even think of that. That's horrendous. Very Lisp-y.
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[attachimg=1]
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The capabilities of Objective-C are actually pretty cool. The language itself is just so...ugly
It's not just the ugliness of all those square brackets - it's the fact that before you can start writing a line you have to know how many messages you'll send or be prepared to move the cursor back and forth as you figure it out. e.g.
NSArray *subviews = [[[[UIApplication sharedApplication] valueForKey:@"statusBar"] valueForKey:@"foregroundView"]subviews];
[)amien
Yes, it looks hellish having to code in Objective-C at first brush. However, in practice it's not that bad.
1) The IDE adds the brackets for you, and its autocompletion is very good. The verbosity that comes as a result of the conventions used isn't a hinderance to writing code, and it helps when reading code. You never have to look up function definitions to figure out what exactly parameter 3 is supposed to be.
2) This applies to more than just Obj-C. I don't like to deeply nest function calls in other languages, so I don't do that in Obj-C either.
3) Dot notation helps somewhat if you're adverse to brackets.
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Having to rely on an IDE for language constructs is just bad language design.
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CS/Mathematics undergrad working at GitHub.com. All CS Programs are terribad unless you actually want to know theory or hope to work at a stuffy, momentum-driven company like IBM, Google, or Microsoft your time is better spent teaching yourself and actually working on toy projects. I've learned a whole lot more making and breaking stuff than class has ever taught me. It would probably help if my school had a decent CS program.
Totally agree here. I've actually only had about 5 years of formal education in my entire life so the majority of what I've learnt has been self taught. Took a course about a decade ago doing C and found it stuffy as hell, learned a bit over 2 years but I still didn't really feel prepared to tackle any real projects. Fast forward to today and I'm learning Java and GWT with the help of my mentor, 6 months in and I'm already well ahead of where I thought I'd be when I started. Then again everyone is different, I don't mind using books for reference when I break something but I'd much rather 'learn by doing' otherwise.
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CS/Mathematics undergrad working at GitHub.com. All CS Programs are terribad unless you actually want to know theory or hope to work at a stuffy, momentum-driven company like IBM, Google, or Microsoft your time is better spent teaching yourself and actually working on toy projects. I've learned a whole lot more making and breaking stuff than class has ever taught me. It would probably help if my school had a decent CS program.
Totally agree here. I've actually only had about 5 years of formal education in my entire life so the majority of what I've learnt has been self taught. Took a course about a decade ago doing C and found it stuffy as hell, learned a bit over 2 years but I still didn't really feel prepared to tackle any real projects. Fast forward to today and I'm learning Java and GWT with the help of my mentor, 6 months in and I'm already well ahead of where I thought I'd be when I started. Then again everyone is different, I don't mind using books for reference when I break something but I'd much rather 'learn by doing' otherwise.
Same here.
Except I find C fascinating and Java stuffy.
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I don't mind using books for reference when I break something but I'd much rather 'learn by doing' otherwise.
Books are great for independent learners! I own a ton. I should add my library to a repo and let people check some of them out.
If you're digging Java now I can't wait til some other languages blow your whole mind. (Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby)
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I don't mind using books for reference when I break something but I'd much rather 'learn by doing' otherwise.
Books are great for independent learners! I own a ton. I should add my library to a repo and let people check some of them out.
If you're digging Java now I can't wait til some other languages blow your whole mind. (Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby)
Yeah since taking my studies more seriously my library has grown a ton. Still find it hard to sit down and read them though, I usually just skim the interesting chapters and check out the sample code until I hit a problem :)
Keep hearing a lot about Ruby, care to give me a bit of a rundown on what you like about it? Bit torn between learning Ruby and Python for the next language.
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What follows is this programmer's opinion, like switches, it will eventually come down to personal taste.
Python prides itself on consistency "there's only one right way to do anything", but in reality there are two object systems, two exception systems, and two different major and incompatible versions of the language out there because they can't agree on when the old language should stop being Python. Python is very much like BASIC because the language is easy to get started with but it's a major pain in the ass to explore the language.
In contrast, Ruby is a language that mandates you understand object oriented programming. Literally everything in the Ruby runtime is an object that you can mess with. Including the garbage collector and interactive console! If you thought Java was Object Oriented, hold on to your butt. In Ruby you can create a new class with code like
MyEpicClass = Class.new
That said, if Object Oriented programming is not your favorite thing, you probably won't enjoy Ruby as much. When you learn one or two things about Ruby, it's really easy to infer a few more things, and from that kernel of knowledge learn about the entire language. However, you have to dive in and really understand *why* Object.class => Class, Class.class => Class, and Class.superclass => Object
If you want to see how and why I love teaching Ruby, check out a conference talk I gave last year: http://confreaks.com/videos/1112-gogaruco2012-sugar-free-ruby-an-experiment-in-object-first-teaching (http://confreaks.com/videos/1112-gogaruco2012-sugar-free-ruby-an-experiment-in-object-first-teaching)
The last and best thing about Ruby is the concept of MINASWAN. Matz wrote Ruby so programmers like him could be happy. That means Matz must be a pretty nice guy. Ergo in Ruby, Matz is nice and so we are nice. MINASWAN.
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What follows is this programmer's opinion, like switches, it will eventually come down to personal taste.
Python prides itself on consistency "there's only one right way to do anything", but in reality there are two object systems, two exception systems, and two different major and incompatible versions of the language out there because they can't agree on when the old language should stop being Python. Python is very much like BASIC because the language is easy to get started with but it's a major pain in the ass to explore the language.
In contrast, Ruby is a language that mandates you understand object oriented programming. Literally everything in the Ruby runtime is an object that you can mess with. Including the garbage collector and interactive console! If you thought Java was Object Oriented, hold on to your butt. In Ruby you can create a new class with code like
MyEpicClass = Class.new
That said, if Object Oriented programming is not your favorite thing, you probably won't enjoy Ruby as much. When you learn one or two things about Ruby, it's really easy to infer a few more things, and from that kernel of knowledge learn about the entire language. However, you have to dive in and really understand *why* Object.class => Class, Class.class => Class, and Class.superclass => Object
If you want to see how and why I love teaching Ruby, check out a conference talk I gave last year: http://confreaks.com/videos/1112-gogaruco2012-sugar-free-ruby-an-experiment-in-object-first-teaching (http://confreaks.com/videos/1112-gogaruco2012-sugar-free-ruby-an-experiment-in-object-first-teaching)
The last and best thing about Ruby is the concept of MINASWAN. Matz wrote Ruby so programmers like him could be happy. That means Matz must be a pretty nice guy. Ergo in Ruby, Matz is nice and so we are nice. MINASWAN.
Cheers for the opinions and the video, slow day at work so I'll definitely watch your talk! Ruby is looking like a winner, I'm a big fan of object-oriented programming (it just makes so much SENSE to me) so it sounds like that's the way to go :thumb:
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At GitHub we have a javascript function for our chatrooms that ensures folks in the southern hemisphere appear upside down. I should whip up a dotjs for GH that does the same thing.
(context: I was nonplussed when you said slow workday at 9:30pm)
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Totally agree here. I've actually only had about 5 years of formal education in my entire life so the majority of what I've learnt has been self taught. Took a course about a decade ago doing C and found it stuffy as hell, learned a bit over 2 years but I still didn't really feel prepared to tackle any real projects. Fast forward to today and I'm learning Java and GWT with the help of my mentor, 6 months in and I'm already well ahead of where I thought I'd be when I started. Then again everyone is different, I don't mind using books for reference when I break something but I'd much rather 'learn by doing' otherwise.
Hell, I'm a high school drop out and I ended up landing one of the better jobs you can get in the biz. Self-taught programmers tend to be much more skilled than traditional CS students (there are always exceptions, but this tends to be fairly accurate).
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Curious daedrid,
How did you teach yourself? I know there's no one formula to success, but i'm interested in learning, but it seems like a big task to tackle.
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At GitHub we have a javascript function for our chatrooms that ensures folks in the southern hemisphere appear upside down. I should whip up a dotjs for GH that does the same thing.
(context: I was nonplussed when you said slow workday at 9:30pm)
Haha yeah I'm lucky in that respect, I can do my day job with my eyes closed. Pretty much the reason why I'm studying to move into programming, I need a challenge.
Totally agree here. I've actually only had about 5 years of formal education in my entire life so the majority of what I've learnt has been self taught. Took a course about a decade ago doing C and found it stuffy as hell, learned a bit over 2 years but I still didn't really feel prepared to tackle any real projects. Fast forward to today and I'm learning Java and GWT with the help of my mentor, 6 months in and I'm already well ahead of where I thought I'd be when I started. Then again everyone is different, I don't mind using books for reference when I break something but I'd much rather 'learn by doing' otherwise.
Hell, I'm a high school drop out and I ended up landing one of the better jobs you can get in the biz. Self-taught programmers tend to be much more skilled than traditional CS students (there are always exceptions, but this tends to be fairly accurate).
Yeah the reason my mentor got in contact with me is because the last few people he'd hired out of the local pool were bloody useless. Said he'd much rather teach me everything I need to know because at least I'm interested in programming, the other guys only did it for a paycheck (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Curious daedrid,
How did you teach yourself? I know there's no one formula to success, but i'm interested in learning, but it seems like a big task to tackle.
Pick a simple application that you want to write and get to work!
I tried following tutorials and all sorts of videos but the best way to learn was just to jump in the deep end. I started out a while back by writing an application that would pull a row from an SQL database and display it in a table. From there I added editing, PDF/excel exporting and a bunch of other functionality until it was a full timesheets application. Only started learning Java like 5 months ago and I'm already working on proper projects, no WAY would I be at the same level if I was 5 months into a CS degree.
It is a lot of work though and you need to be very disciplined and motivated to teach yourself, I work a 40 hour week but I still wind up studying for 10-15 hours a week on average. Luckily I love programming so it doesn't really feel like work :D
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cs education unneccessary, ruby mind blowing... oh my goodness.
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Hell, I'm a high school drop out and I ended up landing one of the better jobs you can get in the biz. Self-taught programmers tend to be much more skilled than traditional CS students (there are always exceptions, but this tends to be fairly accurate).
It sounds like you're the exception ;-) and it's because of the views of the founders of your company that you ultimately have that opportunity. Most places today expect that piece of paper, and if nothing else, it's worth getting to remove a barrier to entry for someone that's currently in school. As far as who's better between cs and non-cs students, it doesn't matter. Getting a cs degree doesn't guarantee you'll be a terrible programmer any more than dropping out of high school and hacking on your own guarantees you'll be an excellent one. Ultimately, all education is self-education meaning that a person only truly learns when they explore and internalize the concepts on their own. This is true in any discipline. Currently, it is impossible to have knowledge and understanding injected into your brain, so it must be put there by mentally wrestling with concepts. It doesn't matter whether those concepts were presented by a tutorial on the interwebz or a lecturing professor. The idea behind a cs program is that there is a relatively comprehensive and systematic presentation of the concepts one needs to know to be successful as a computer scientist. The fact that many people get these degrees while failing to understand the concepts is irrelevant and no reason to shun the whole system. In the same way, the fact that someone intelligent dropped out of school in their past is irrelevant when evaluating what they can do today and no reason to shun them.
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Having to rely on an IDE for language constructs is just bad language design.
Sure. I'm not a big fan of Objective-C's brackets either. I was simply saying that, from my real world experience, brackets are not a problem. I rarely type a left square bracket while writing Objective-C. The IDE takes care of it - so what.
The problem with Objective-C is that Objective-C-is-a-strict-superset-of-C. Most of the warts stem from that. Would I give up the ability to drop down to C at any time in order to gain a cleaner language? I've dabbled in RubyMotion, but so far haven't felt that it's worth my while just to be able to use Ruby to write iOS apps. And here we come to the truth of the matter. Not many people would bother with Objective-C were it not for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. The framework is 3/4 of the story. Cocoa and Cocoa Touch are pretty awesome.
Objective-C is far from perfect. But it is pragmatic, and it does have two big things going for it. It's got C's performance, available on tap, anywhere, anytime. And it's got Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.
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Hell, I'm a high school drop out and I ended up landing one of the better jobs you can get in the biz. Self-taught programmers tend to be much more skilled than traditional CS students (there are always exceptions, but this tends to be fairly accurate).
It sounds like you're the exception ;-) and it's because of the views of the founders of your company that you ultimately have that opportunity. Most places today expect that piece of paper, and if nothing else, it's worth getting to remove a barrier to entry for someone that's currently in school. As far as who's better between cs and non-cs students, it doesn't matter. Getting a cs degree doesn't guarantee you'll be a terrible programmer any more than dropping out of high school and hacking on your own guarantees you'll be an excellent one. Ultimately, all education is self-education meaning that a person only truly learns when they explore and internalize the concepts on their own. This is true in any discipline. Currently, it is impossible to have knowledge and understanding injected into your brain, so it must be put there by mentally wrestling with concepts. It doesn't matter whether those concepts were presented by a tutorial on the interwebz or a lecturing professor. The idea behind a cs program is that there is a relatively comprehensive and systematic presentation of the concepts one needs to know to be successful as a computer scientist. The fact that many people get these degrees while failing to understand the concepts is irrelevant and no reason to shun the whole system. In the same way, the fact that someone intelligent dropped out of school in their past is irrelevant when evaluating what they can do today and no reason to shun them.
While I do agree that most places today want the piece of paper, I've to say that I see the same pattern as daried, for some reason all the people that I hired in the last 5 years, 2 different countries in 2 different continents and had CS graduations got fired in less than 3 month while most of the "CS-less" still working with us and we are quite satisfied with.
I probably just have bad luck but this is a quite interesting effect.
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cs education unneccessary, ruby mind blowing... oh my goodness.
Care to expand upon that thought?
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cs education unneccessary, ruby mind blowing... oh my goodness.
Care to expand upon that thought?
This^^
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While I do agree that most places today want the piece of paper, I've to say that I see the same pattern as daried, for some reason all the people that I hired in the last 5 years, 2 different countries in 2 different continents and had CS graduations got fired in less than 3 month while most of the "CS-less" still working with us and we are quite satisfied with.
I probably just have bad luck but this is a quite interesting effect.
I don't doubt that. Just like I could tell you about the past two places I've worked that no longer hire people without degrees because they've been burned by hiring self-taught programmers. Again, my point is that the method of education is irrelevant and shouldn't even be considered when hiring a developer. However, where I live and work, degree-less programmers face a huge, almost insurmountable barrier to enter the job market. For that reason, if a high school or college student asked me whether they should drop out of school to learn on their own, I'd say stay in school AND learn on your own and have a much easier time of entering the job market.
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While I do agree that most places today want the piece of paper, I've to say that I see the same pattern as daried, for some reason all the people that I hired in the last 5 years, 2 different countries in 2 different continents and had CS graduations got fired in less than 3 month while most of the "CS-less" still working with us and we are quite satisfied with.
I probably just have bad luck but this is a quite interesting effect.
I don't doubt that. Just like I could tell you about the past two places I've worked that no longer hire people without degrees because they've been burned by hiring self-taught programmers. Again, my point is that the method of education is irrelevant and shouldn't even be considered when hiring a developer. However, where I live and work, degree-less programmers face a huge, almost insurmountable barrier to enter the job market. For that reason, if a high school or college student asked me whether they should drop out of school to learn on their own, I'd say stay in school AND learn on your own and have a much easier time of entering the job market.
Yep, sound advice.
I suspect one factor that differentiates scholastically taught candidates versus self-taught is the specificity of the training. If you want someone with good general knowledge of software programming concepts, then looking for applicants with CS degrees is the way to go. If you're trying to fill a specific job requirement, and you need a skilled programmer in Tc/Tkl, or Tuxedo, or Ruby, or Python, etc., then interview candidates with those skills on their resumes, and test their capabilities on the application you need their skills for. Degrees in the latter case are relatively unimportant.
One difference you may find in the job market is that recruiters/human resource personnel may winnow stacks of resumes by broad criteria like degree level, so the hiring manager may never even see the candidates with programming experience but lack of formal educational certificates. The justification for this strategy is that people who have shown they can buckle down and complete a degree are more likely to stay with an employer longer, reducing training and hiring costs in the long run.
No axe to grind, just presenting some perspective gained by being a job seeker, and also by being a hiring manager.
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Software Engineer for a big healthcare solutions company based in Kansas City. A big company but for some reason though I am known as the keyboard guy around my cube space
Can only think of one company that could be out there and fit this bill. And if it's the one I'm thinking of, I've dealt with them before in my current job, and I have an old classmate that works for them, too, doing dev work.
Back on subject: can't say I've delved into the meatier languages. I've done some HTML/CSS/PHP/JQuery here and there for work. Back in college, I did some C and VB.net. Now, though, I'm primarily just doing scripting with PowerShell.
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Coding and engineering are two different things. You don't go to school to learn how to code, you go to learn about the science of computation and the practice of designing large systems in efficient, proven, maintainable ways. I'm not looking down on anyone here in particular who doesn't have a degree, but it's not fair to say that formal CS programs are worthless. They teach you how to think about problems, about design and analysis, etc.
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Coding and engineering are two different things. You don't go to school to learn how to code, you go to learn about the science of computation and the practice of designing large systems in efficient, proven, maintainable ways. I'm not looking down on anyone here in particular who doesn't have a degree, but it's not fair to say that formal CS programs are worthless. They teach you how to think about problems, about design and analysis, etc.
This is a very good point, design patterns are something that I definitely want to do some reading on.
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it's not fair to say that formal CS programs are worthless.
If I said that, then I completely misspoke. Although I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that San Jose State's CS program is worthless :(. There are fantastic programs out there. However, it's no longer the case that you *need* to go to university to learn these things. In traditional engineering fields like Mechanical, Civic, and Computer engineering, you really rely on the resources of the college to help you make your way. You can't decide as an amateur engineer to build a bridge.
For software engineering, there's no scarcity of raw materials. Anyone can get started building an application and if they decide it's not for them, or they love it but it's terrible and they need to rewrite it. The only investment was their time.
Computer Science is special, sacred to me even. But I don't believe for a second that a traditional education is required to be a computer scientist, software engineer, or programmer.
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I wasn't responding to you in particular, just to the general path this thread has gone down. I felt like we were confounding languages and technique with theory and analysis.
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cs education unneccessary, ruby mind blowing... oh my goodness.
Care to expand upon that thought?
upon which one? the latter one does not need much expansion: as long as you are more or less educated in the field, there is nothing in ruby which can blow your mind. on the usefulness of academic education for programmers i will post later. i never thought such posting would be neccessary.
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I totally misread your post, iri. I thought it was meant as "cs education is unnecessary. ruby, on the other hand, is mind blowing".
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I totally misread your post, iri. I thought it was meant as "cs education is unnecessary. ruby, on the other hand, is mind blowing".
haha same here.
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Curious daedrid,
How did you teach yourself? I know there's no one formula to success, but i'm interested in learning, but it seems like a big task to tackle.
The only way I can answer this really is I kept asking questions. If I didn't understand something, I'd do research and read up and experiment until I understood it (or thought I did). If I later came across a new piece of information that didn't make sense, I studied the hell out of that until either a) I understood it as a valid piece of information that contributed to more understanding, or b) it understood it as an invalid and therefore false piece of information.
I know that's terribly abstract, and I'm sorry, but that's the best way I can explain my approach.
And I wasn't trying to insinuate that CS degrees are worthless, I'm sorry if it came out that way. I was merely stating that it shouldn't be a deterrent to learning the field, nor should it be a factor in determining whether somebody knows the field or not. That's all.
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Oh, and I know that tons of great projects have been created with Ruby, and I'm sure there are tons of great things in the language... I just have yet to find any. :-P
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I was merely stating that it shouldn't be a deterrent to learning the field, nor should it be a factor in determining whether somebody knows the field or not. That's all.
+1
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Curious daedrid,
How did you teach yourself? I know there's no one formula to success, but i'm interested in learning, but it seems like a big task to tackle.
The only way I can answer this really is I kept asking questions. If I didn't understand something, I'd do research and read up and experiment until I understood it (or thought I did). If I later came across a new piece of information that didn't make sense, I studied the hell out of that until either a) I understood it as a valid piece of information that contributed to more understanding, or b) it understood it as an invalid and therefore false piece of information.
I know that's terribly abstract, and I'm sorry, but that's the best way I can explain my approach.
This is pretty much how I work. Find something interesting that confuses the hell out of me, sit there until I understand it and then move on!
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cs education unneccessary, ruby mind blowing... oh my goodness.
Care to expand upon that thought?
on the necessity of proper cs education for a programmer.
actually, history proves i was wrong. it is not necessary at all. one might create popular, world famous programming projects even completely not having any software related education. just look at drupal.
and surely, a piece of paper named degree certificate doesn't mean its owner can do their job well. and surely, there are people who are good in self-teaching, and successful autodidacts (like the creator of pugs) do exist in the programming world. however, software development, though young, is a very broad subject difficult to be embraced by an individual without proper programme. proper programme is the first big plus of a good cs course in a good university. another one is that a student has a few years to learn pure aspects of computer science without pressure, managers, deadlines, and so on.
"learn by work" approach could work nice in areas not very demanding for a programmer's skill. like web application development, for instance. start with learning some html, then add some procedural php, then basic sql, then learn some oop, then maybe a framework (not necessary), and you're an accomplished programmer! i've seen dozens of such on job interviews. as an interviewer, i asked everyone who applied for a web developer position to write the simplest possible implementation of singleton in any programming language. one out of five could. those people somehow manage to pirsue programming career and not to be hungry. but there are areas closed for them: anything related to realtime, embedded, systems programming and so on. these areas require fundamental education. and when you are getting the basis for such education, it's much better for you to be a student and focus on learning.
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cs education unneccessary, ruby mind blowing... oh my goodness.
Care to expand upon that thought?
on the necessity of proper cs education for a programmer.
actually, history proves i was wrong. it is not necessary at all. one might create popular, world famous programming projects even completely not having any software related education. just look at drupal.
and surely, a piece of paper named degree certificate doesn't mean its owner can do their job well. and surely, there are people who are good in self-teaching, and successful autodidacts (like the creator of pugs) do exist in the programming world. however, software development, though young, is a very broad subject difficult to be embraced by an individual without proper programme. proper programme is the first big plus of a good cs course in a good university. another one is that a student has a few years to learn pure aspects of computer science without pressure, managers, deadlines, and so on.
"learn by work" approach could work nice in areas not very demanding for a programmer's skill. like web application development, for instance. start with learning some html, then add some procedural php, then basic sql, then learn some oop, then maybe a framework (not necessary), and you're an accomplished programmer! i've seen dozens of such on job interviews. as an interviewer, i asked everyone who applied for a web developer position to write the simplest possible implementation of singleton in any programming language. one out of five could. those people somehow manage to pirsue programming career and not to be hungry. but there are areas closed for them: anything related to realtime, embedded, systems programming and so on. these areas require fundamental education. and when you are getting the basis for such education, it's much better for you to be a student and focus on learning.
+1 for fundamental education! programming languages are tools (imho)
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Currently an undergraduate CS student, and have been doing C# development full-time for two years now. I really love what I do
Not being able to work on my personal projects during the school year is a big drain, though I don't get enough sleep as it is ^-^
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Currently an undergraduate CS student, and have been doing C# development full-time for two years now. I really love what I do
Not being able to work on my personal projects during the school year is a big drain, though I don't get enough sleep as it is ^-^
I know the feel. Work is basically my pet projects right now. I've had no time for anything but schoolwork and volunteer work lately. No time to hack on work stuff. :sob:
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Computer Science student here. And I, too, don't find the time for private programming projects. I played ChooseThree{Study, Work, Family+Friends, Hobbies} and I lost Hobbies. :-\
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It gets much worse once you're out of school, IMO. I feel like I had so much free time in school!
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It gets much worse once you're out of school, IMO. I feel like I had so much free time in school!
^^ that
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Full time Objective-C developer since 2008 here. I do a bit of Ruby and Python on the side, and piddle in a lot of languages for fun. I was full-time .NET (C#) for about 8 years (since the beta) before that. I started with (mostly) Pascal and Java in high school/college.
RE the Obj-C-is-ugly comments... You get used to it. I've grown to like it, though I still have a soft spot C#.
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It gets much worse once you're out of school, IMO. I feel like I had so much free time in school!
^^ that
Heh... though as I recall, I spent much of it drinking. :)
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Not sure if I am in an atypical situation, or if i underestimate post-college life... But I can't imagine having less free time than I do during school now.
I work full time during the summers, sometimes closer to 60 hr weeks, and I have more free time than I do while working part time and going to school.
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Not sure if I am in an atypical situation, or if i underestimate post-college life... But I can't imagine having less free time than I do during school now.
You're not atypical. Most college students respond that way when someone tells them they'll have less free time after college. I know I did. What post-grads really mean is that you'll have less control over your time as life goes on, mostly if you have a family. While college life is busy, it was/is still ultimately your free choice that brought/keeps you there. If you want to leave you can. Walking out and leaving becomes more difficult when you have others depending upon you. As a result, you lose that freedom of control over your time which gives the feeling of less free time than you had in college.
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Not sure if I am in an atypical situation, or if i underestimate post-college life... But I can't imagine having less free time than I do during school now.
You're not atypical. Most college students respond that way when someone tells them they'll have less free time after college. I know I did. What post-grads really mean is that you'll have less control over your time as life goes on, mostly if you have a family. While college life is busy, it was/is still ultimately your free choice that brought/keeps you there. If you want to leave you can. Walking out and leaving becomes more difficult when you have others depending upon you. As a result, you lose that freedom of control over your time which gives the feeling of less free time than you had in college.
Amen. Once you have children, kiss all your free time good bye (at least for the first several years).
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Nah. Kids would drive me insane in less than a week. Then, I'd have plenty of free time in a madhouse/prison.
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I'm gonna attempt to learn java this weekend (that's what android apps are coded in, yes?). I need it for a project.
Tips? Resources?
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I'm so sorry. You have my deepest sympathy.
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I'm gonna attempt to learn java this weekend (that's what android apps are coded in, yes?). I need it for a project.
Tips? Resources?
What do you mean by "learn"? Java is a massive language/framework. With only a weekend to invest, I'd say make friends with the API docs. What languages are you familiar with now?
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I'm gonna attempt to learn java this weekend (that's what android apps are coded in, yes?). I need it for a project.
Tips? Resources?
What do you mean by "learn"? Java is a massive language/framework. With only a weekend to invest, I'd say make friends with the API docs. What languages are you familiar with now?
Mostly arduino, with a bit of C#.
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Well Java is very similar to C# syntactically and shares similar principles. I'd say just go through the tutorials on Oracle's site to get started and then Google and API docs from there.
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I'm taking AP Computer Science A right now in school.
I transferred in 3 weeks late and I took the tests I missed with only my previous CS knowledge. I have a 82 right now.
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Quite surprised how many people like C# on here :)
It's a lovely language, powerful and flexible. A little verbose at times but some great features.
Shame the framework classes are so fragmented across ASP.Net, Silverlight, Windows Phone, Windows 8, WPF, WinForms/Desktop, Xbox etc.
Even code to create a HttpRequest varies across all of those :(
[)amien
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C# has a lot to like... strong reflection, decent type system, LINQ, expression fragments, IL-emitting & rewriting, etc.
Unfortunately, non-deterministic destruction is horrid. Figure out how to retrofit C# with C++ style RAII and deterministic-destruction, and you've got yourself a language!
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In practice, IDisposable and the using statement give you a fairly decent alternative.
Personally I'd absolutely love scope-bound RAII (of sorts in c#), but in practice not having it isn't really that big of a deal. I'm curious why you use the term "horrid".
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IDisposable is just a kludge... and an ackowledgement that a non-deterministic garbage collector is unworkable for the real-world. And peppering your code with "using" statements (and having to *remember* to use them) does not an elegant language make.
It's really the worst of both worlds... you still have to manually manage your resources, but don't get the benefits of automatic & deterministic destruction when something goes out of scope.
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IDisposable is just a kludge... and an ackowledgement that a non-deterministic garbage collector is unworkable for the real-world. And peppering your code with "using" statements (and having to *remember* to use them) does not an elegant language make.
It's really the worst of both worlds... you still have to manually manage your resources, but don't get the benefits of automatic & deterministic destruction when something goes out of scope.
Having worked professionally in c# since it's release, I can pretty much state with confidence that you're incorrect. It may not be an "elegant" language, but that's really personal opinion. I find it much, much more elegant than c++, for instance.
Regardless, languages are like religions, I have no intention of dragging out any sort of religious debate here or anywhere else. I have work to do.
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I find it much, much more elegant than c++, for instance.
what is less elegant than c++? cobol? prolog? ats?
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what is less elegant than c++? cobol? prolog? ats?
PHP.
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i'm not so sure about that.
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It's all personal opinion. The only verifiable facts about a language are what it can and can't do. Anything regarding its aesthetics is purely subjective.
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It is a useful language, sure.
But elegant it is not. Just look at the API names, parameter orders etc. It has no consistency.
http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
https://bugs.php.net/search.php?cmd=display&search_for=inconsistent&x=0&y=0
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Yet consistency really has no relationship to elegance in an empirical sense. Hell, "elegance" has can't even be empirically defined, as it's defined solely by the reader in his or her own terms.
I've seen code in PHP and C++ I would consider elegant, but somebody else might not. Who's "correct"?
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Just my grain of salt:
Programmers in general aim to improve the way they code over time. Practices improves, or try to improve to make code better, easier to read, easier to maintain. And even if we would like to refactor everything we make to keep it consistent and nice and sweet, in the end it's just plain impossible since it's always changing. So having this sort of debate, while not pointless since it's very good and productive to aim to improve things, will in some way always be biased since whatever you do will be obsolete in a mater of time. My philosophy in this is to continue to work hard learning to make better code even in the reality of deadlines and lack of resources etc.
Bashing a very working language has not much point. Pointing it's weaknesses in the objective of correcting them one day or not making the same error twice is quite more interesting. You can bash all you want on C, C++, C#, they all have their plus and minus, and they all have been very useful and still are.
And if you want to try a crappy language, go have fun with visual foxpro. I have been stuck coding with this language for the major part of the last 5 years. But even if I hate it, even if the code I have been working on was crap to begin with, I still need to do my job and improve things. And when I have the opportunity to code in c#, hell I am not so picky since working with a "true" object oriented language is enough of an improvement to put a smile on my face.
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I think there's a lot of space between "objectively elegant" and "elegance is purely subjective". You can't nail elegance down but you can make reasonable statements about what it is and the relative elegance that languages encourage and/or allow.
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I find it much, much more elegant than c++, for instance.
what is less elegant than c++? cobol? prolog? ats?
BASIC
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I find it much, much more elegant than c++, for instance.
what is less elegant than c++? cobol? prolog? ats?
BASIC
OKAY YOU GOT ME
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10 PRINT ":-)"
20 GOTO 10
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I want to get into programming, could you guys guide me in the right direction on how to get started?
thanks.
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I want to get into programming, could you guys guide me in the right direction on how to get started?
thanks.
Pick a target architecture. Although most languages are fairly cross-platform, nevertheless there might be something in particular you have in mind.
Pick a language. Almost anything will do. Python, Java, C, C++ and C# seem to be popular contenders for general purpose programming.
Find a problem that needs solving (could be something simple as an app to help you catalog your keycap collection).
Write code, learning what you need to know to solve your particular problem.
Once that is solved, find another problem and, using the experience from the first app, write a second one.
Revisit and polish the first one based on what you learned doing the second one.
Repeat a few times, trying to do something different and learn a bit more each time.
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I want to get into programming, could you guys guide me in the right direction on how to get started?
thanks.
try this: http://scratch.mit.edu/
(j/k)
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what is less elegant than c++? cobol? prolog? ats?
Perl.
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what is less elegant than c++? cobol? prolog? ats?
Perl.
oh, but how can this be not elegant?
s$$([},&%#}/&/]+}%&{})*;#$&&s&&$^X.($'^"%]=\&(|?*{%
+.+=%;.#_}\&"^"-+%*).}%:##%}={~=~:.")&e&&s""`$''`"e
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what is less elegant than c++? cobol? prolog? ats?
Perl.
oh, but how can this be not elegant?
s$$([},&%#}/&/]+}%&{})*;#$&&s&&$^X.($'^"%]=\&(|?*{%
+.+=%;.#_}\&"^"-+%*).}%:##%}={~=~:.")&e&&s""`$''`"e
My prof in Uni used to say:
In Russia they chop your hands if you code like that. And this was back in 1997.
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what is less elegant than c++? cobol? prolog? ats?
Perl.
oh, but how can this be not elegant?
s$$([},&%#}/&/]+}%&{})*;#$&&s&&$^X.($'^"%]=\&(|?*{%
+.+=%;.#_}\&"^"-+%*).}%:##%}={~=~:.")&e&&s""`$''`"e
My prof in Uni used to say:
In Russia they chop your hands if you code like that. And this was back in 1997.
in russia, if you code like that, they chop off your fingers, phalanx by phalanx.
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I want to get into programming, could you guys guide me in the right direction on how to get started?
thanks.
Pick a target architecture. Although most languages are fairly cross-platform, nevertheless there might be something in particular you have in mind.
Pick a language. Almost anything will do. Python, Java, C, C++ and C# seem to be popular contenders for general purpose programming.
Find a problem that needs solving (could be something simple as an app to help you catalog your keycap collection).
Write code, learning what you need to know to solve your particular problem.
Once that is solved, find another problem and, using the experience from the first app, write a second one.
Revisit and polish the first one based on what you learned doing the second one.
Repeat a few times, trying to do something different and learn a bit more each time.
+1
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I program at UIL meets and contests and such, I'm liking it, first year, and I'm doing Java! :D