Coding

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So, is anyone here a coder? I assume there are lots of them here. If so what kind of stuff do you program?

I mainly program games and 3D engines in C++ using SDL and OpenGL (my stuff compiles both for Linux and Windows). Too bad I rarely actually finish a game.

I did Pascal and Delphi in school, and I used Visual Basic for projects at home.

Now, I'm using a scripting language for video editing, called AVISynth. You can make some incredible images with it, based on previous video.

Check out this page on my website if you want to look at it...

http://actionman133.isa-geek.net:8080/M ... ml#Hector1

The pics there are of Brad Pitt in Troy taken from the DVD and adjusted to look like thermographic video. Cool, huh? Being visual based, this is my obsession as you can tell by the number of videos on the site.

I'm a coder or developer as my payslip calls me, whatever that is.

I can program in BASIC, Ada, Pascal, C, C++, Java, PLSQL, MC68K Assembly etc etc.
The first language I learnt was Sinclair Basic on the ZX81, back when I was a wee boy in 1982 - seven to be precise.

These days I mostly write PLSQL in Oracle 10g for a living, I just love the neatness of set theory and how relational databases fit together. I find it all very soothing somehow.

I've only ever written one game in my life. That was a football (soccer to you Americans) management simulator in 1988, on the good old ZX Spectrum. I wasn't much interested in football (nor am I now), but the data manipulation side of it really appealed, hence my career today.

Rather than games, I prefer to work on things with a specific purpose or application.
I did once write a complete spreadsheet package, probably as good as Excel was when I did it in 1993. That was on the good old Amiga in AMOS - anyone remember that?

These days I don't write my own software - no time for that when you have a baby and a full time job!

I wish I were good at coding, I really do. But I'm not. Life would be so much easier though.

Why would life be easier if you could code? It's certainly not the be all and end all for me!

I code, though sometimes I try not to.

I grew up in the early 80's, and my primary Obsession was coding and writing games. Most of it was written in assembler, and I sold quite a few games too. Note that this is an obsession with a capital O - long periods with no sleep or food or anything, just the drive to do neat things that no one else thought was possible.

I deliberately tried to cut down on computing when I went to university, and in my mid 20's I went through a period of monastic abstinence where I deliberately did not have a programmable computer at all at home. This was a choice to try to force myself to Do Other Things.

Now of course, I'm back coding, but no where near as obsessively... (C, C++, Python, Perl, Obj-C, MATLAB/Octave).

I do some coder, though I'm rather inept compared to many of the people on here.

I do enjoy it when things go well, but I get frustrated with myself when I make stupid and obvious mistakes. It is worth it - missing meals, staying up late, not doing other things that need doing - when it does finally come together and work as I want it to. And this leads onto the next bit, nothing ever seems to be truly 'finished' to my satisfaction because I always think of other ways I could have done it, or other features I want to add to it.

Therefore, none of my coding efforts are ever completed. If I could lay off the booze, I could have correspondingly more time to work on the code.

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I just spent 4 years doing a comp science degree and i can't program for sh*t !

Suppose computing covers a wide area so i dont need to be a coder. But i want to be cos a lonely coder is a job that suits us aspies But im just so incredibly slow when it comes to learning these things, although partly due to laziness.

Im trying to learn PHP/MySQL now or anything related to web dev. Anyone know some good tutorials ?

I program in java, C++, C, did a bit of Ada, a bit of pascal, a bit of everything really.

I seem to be getting worse as time goes on though. I haven't actually made any programs for ages and i'm starting to get out of practise.

I code in Python. It's really easy to learn and use! I mostly do little scripts as utilities for things I'm interested in...

I'm learning C programming in school now... It seems so primitive.

I code for a living. I work with VB and ASP.NET.

Don't knock C. My current suite of languages includes Awk, Python, and C.

Awk is for me the most natural language for me to use. I use it when I'm doing relatively simple things with streamed data.

Python is extremely powerful, and I use it for research programming. It's much faster to program than something like C. However, it is sooooooo sssssllllllloooooowwww to run, especially when you're working in very high numbers of algorithmic passes. That's where...

C shines. I actually do things that get into the trillions of algorithmic passes. In my applications, C runs 70 to 80 times faster for the same functionality. If you're talking about something that runs in seconds, it doesn't make much difference. Some of my programs can run for days, and those are the times when C can make a big difference.

The big problem with python seems to be the hash lookups. I found that basic code using simple variables was fairly efficient, but that performance crumpled as soon as you tried anything fancy with classes etc. It seems that the interpreter has to do a surprising number of hash lookups on the class member names which really slows things down.

In the end I moved my code in to C++. I miss the introspection capabilities of python, but the C++ code is 10 to 100x faster...

I've been coding since an age of 8 in the early 80s. I began with BASIC (on a cool nice Atari 400, then 800 XL) and some simple 6502 Assembler code (think most of my Assembler code wouldn't be deemed interesting today), moving to Turbo Pascal on early PCs using DOS and VGA graphics, then, with the beginning of my physics studies, a little FORTRAN (ooks, numerically powerfull -- but not really beautifull when you get sticked to F' 77) and near the end, I learned C, in which I did my University Diploma thesis (in Germany, it compares roughly to the more international Master degree, but the way to it is longer and the knowledge more general, I think) and my Doctoral thesis on neural networks. Then, I started to learn some more languages by mere interest (as I certainly did the most things I did really well), as Python (which I like because of its expressive power and intuitivity), Scheme (which I like for its simplicity and methodological power) and Forth (which is mere minimalist -- but compares in some aspects well to LISPs as Scheme). Since my Doc thesis, my programming efforts stagnated -- don't really know why, maybe because of the load of "normal" things to do, but I didn't like, but even as likely because of a shift of my interest to playing more piano, reading more on the internet (mainly acquiring new knowledge on Wikipedia) and discussing political issues more intensively.

Oops, this was long. Seems, I tend for long articles...

Greetz,
Burx -- a little green alien disguised as human.