Programmer Roll Call?

Well, I was always a little curious, back in high school (about 3 years ago), my main hobby was drawing and design. But once I went into community college, I decided to take up programming, aspiring to be in the game industry and all, and I figured my art skills weren't very good anyways. Since then I've taken an interest in it, and at times I can enjoy it (when I have an idea I'd like to mess with anyway).

So, how many of you out there are also programmers in one language or another? I thought it would be interesting to share how we all decided to take up the complex task of programming, and what do you enjoy about it?

As for me, I'm just recently looking into openGL, I just finished my data structures class and figured its time to try and get away from the dos window for a bit (or as much as possible anyways :P) and start learning something a bit more advanced. But I also know HTML,CSS, and Javascript(to a degree). and plan on taking a PHP and Flash class to strengthen my web programming skills.I like Web design because I get to incorporate more artistic design into it.

So enough of my ranting, anyone else wanna join in?

Programming (some may be better categorized as scripting):
C Family - C, C++, C#
Java
Lisp
Pascal
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Visual Basic

Not programming: HTML, CSS

At work, we are working on a new game using "Ruby" programing, which apparently has a bunch of people weirded out. I thought I might take a gander though, because apparently it is supposed to be a much simpler way of programing. I'm not going to get deep into it at all though - but I will look over the shoulders of people all over the office who will be using it.

Thanks for the correction, twas a foolish mistake on my end to include HTML and CSS as programming languages.

C++ is my first language, other than that I've looked into python a little, but not ruby. At this point I'm just trying to get to at least an intermediate understanding of c++ before I even think of tackling any other languages.

Where Ruby shines is with the Rails framework. It practically codes itself.

C++&C#
Java
Python
VB.net
PHP

 

I have to learn C++ and Java for a minor in computer science, however I never want to do nothing but code as a job....EVER. My main interest is electrical engineering.

I'm decent in C++ programming, find it pretty interesting. Hope to get really good at it. Learning Java next semester, yee. Too bad the professor teaching it apparently sucks kinda badly. Guess ill have to learn most of it on my own. Looking forward to it though.



Not sure if I got what you meant. Weirded out because the workers aren't familiar with Ruby or some other reason? Don't know much about Ruby, kind of curious.

Because it isn't normal to make a video game in Ruby. I think the lead programmer decided to go with it because the game is simplistic in design. He must of thought now was a great time to try it.

Python is my #1 language. Fluent in Java, C, shell. Know my way around Scheme, Haskell. Learning GoLang.

I love to code, for the sake of coding. Working on something to integrate awesome wm with gnome better via debus. Working on a terminal style quicklaunch that doesn't suck like gnome-deskbar-applet. Writing a new website using web.py. And some stuff for my job.

That's pretty much what I've had to do with all of my programming classes...Assembly Language was a nightmare....interesting though.

See, I've always like assembly programming (MIPS). It's so deliciously "unstructured." Even though I've ended up a pretty high-level userland programmer, I kinda always wished I could get into something like that. I'm one of those people who's looking forward to the return of the unstructured era of programming where we didn't have strong typing and "object oriented buzzwords" keeping the programmer down. You'd be amazed at the fun stuff you can do in Python, C, and Scheme when you're language's primary concern is NOT limiting you're method of implementation (as opposed to like Java whose primary concern is some kind of notion of "best practices" and good structure).

If you don't believe me, look at what google is doing with GoLang, it's a static compiled language that feels like a dynamic interpreted language. The programming world has had enough of the "S&P" folks telling us how to do things...

Im taking Assembly next semester too...now you got me scared, lol. What about assembly makes it a nightmare? Need to be mentally prepared for whats coming up, haha.

I have the feeling im gonna have some big workloads after winter break. 2 programming classes and 2 math classes with the hardest math teachers on campus.

I took Pascal and C++ my Sophomore year in high school, and nearly failed both classes. I was so certain that programming was what I wanted to do, but I clearly demonstrated my incompetency, so I quickly gave up on that "dream".

Oh god, you LIKED Scheme?

I wouldn't say the class itself was a nightmare, just the fact that the professor didn't really have things in order at the time and also the fact that I don't think he could even explain even simple things without making is sound overly complicated.

Assembly is just a lower level language, and like twofish was saying, isn't very structured. The hardest part at first will be getting used to some binary and hexadecimal if you haven't been introduced to those yet, but even then, it isn't too hard to grasp.

Assembly in my opinion just looks very different from the c++ (my first and currently only high-level programming language to learn) that I've been dealing with, so getting used to the way this language looked and worked was pretty tough. Its very interesting and I'd probably have gotten a little more out of the class if the professor was a bit better, and if I didn't already have a heavy class load.

Just Be sure to pay good attention when they start talking about cpu registers, flags, and the stack. If your class is anything like mine, you'll deal with them often.

Other than that, just do as one would normally do, pay attention, do the homework, blah blah blah, and you should do fine.

``We conjure the spirit of the machine with our spells" (read SICP)

But yea, a lot of people don't like Scheme or Haskell because procedures are usually recursively defined. Once you figure out how to isomorphise things like ``for'' and ``while'' constructs into their recursive forms, and get used to the fact that under the hood they are really the same thing (think about it! in CPU architecture procedures are just recursions on a call stack) it becomes a lot more clear, and you almost feel like you've gotten rid of an unnecessary layer of abstraction.