I'll agree with the requirement for the foundation. It will certainly help.. On the other hand, doing this for over 30 years now, the number of folks that 'understand' the hardware and software issues is now so small.

Learning a programming language is only worthwhile if you intend to USE it, otherwise you will never get to understand the issues and problems.

So that points me back to asking, what kinds of applications will you write, and which languages are the best to know to accomplish that..

also, for those of you fiddling with graphical applications, please take a few minutes to consider the issues for people with disabilities (my current area of consulting expertise). my team web site, http://www.ibm.com/able/guidelines/index.html has a good starting place for tips and techniques you should be aware of as you develop your applications.

As for languages in general... I love assembler, C, Rexx and Java.. hate C++

Sam Detweiler
IBM Corp
Accessibility Center (http://www.ibm.com/able)
Austin, Texas

 

argh c++.....Took that at college. Wasn't too terrible. Me and my friend somehow made it through. It was pretty neat to do though, like a giant puzzle.

 

You'll get no argument from me here, I was just defending the "visual tools". As with anything else fundamentals are importnat. You can't rebuild an engine if you don't understand how timing works.

Non documented "features" I've seen my share of those!

 

MRKnight, those "features" were things like rebooting the machine randomly. Which is actually a good thing, with Windows...

 

Whoo boy, here we go, this hit a nerve with me.

I think I'll pick up a couple of medical journals and go start to practice medicine. Too many folks seek to develop their programming skills becuase of all of the 'high paying' jobs that exist out there. Do us a favor, don't.

Although I went to school way too many years, and have been paid for doing development for 24 years, I am in no way saying that you have to be formally educated to become an extraordinarily talented developer. But if you are going to do this, make sure you are getting into it becuase you want to excel at it, create value for the organization you work for, and forward the industry or perhaps just for your own enjoyment. My professional opinion is that too many people see the dollar signs, read a few 'for dummies' books, BS their way into a position and then create more work for the rest of us cleaning up your messes.

This folks, is what F'ed up the industry in the 90's.

 

I only develop to create tools to make my own job easier or as a special request to a current contract or employer. It's not my actual job function. I do it more out of enjoyment, it's almost like art for me (since I can't draw, sculpt or paint ) I hold the personal belief that software development is not the place to start right now because I see many of these development jobs go offshore. Have any of you recently opened a utlity or installed an application and noticed bad grammar usage?

 

Offshore. Oh there's another good one. Not that the folks aren't talented, quite the contrary.

Its like a couple of folks who have some money get together and say: "Hey let's start a software company" They hire contract labor (on shore, near shore, or offshore) and give them NO REAL DIRECTION. Of course the poor developers can't come up with much out of nothing and then the industry gets another black eye.

It's the idiots who found, manage, and direct these operations. Oh well, back to the medical texts.

Edit: You know, I've hijacked this thread. I can really provide some input.

If you start out with C, you can acheive an intimate understanding of how software works. When you move to C++ you are more importantly learning a new paradigm, Object Oriented Programming, which is a fancy way of saying that if you do it right, you will be able to maintain the programming more easily and leverage your existing work to support greater functionality.

Now then, the advice given to learn C# (pronounced C-Sharp) is good advice; although I'd say that ANY accomplished C/C++ developer will also be a good C# developer, provided they take the time to understand the namespaces offered by the CLR.

You're kind of screwed if you come from a language like Basic or VB (I love VB by the way) becuase those languages try to take care of so much for you, you miss some of the underlying theory (data structures, specific types, memory allocation, and *pointers*).

Don't even get me started on the object orientation of VB versus C++; there's so many nitwits using VB's delegation model that they have swept the industry into thinking that that IS OOP. Sheesh. Anyone use SmallTalk? That's REAL object orientation. (Why do I bother to ask? My guess is many of you are too young to know of it.)

While I'm at it, why on God's green earth would they develop AutoCAD using LISP? In what way would that language lend itself wll to the application? Oh well here I go hijacking the thread again.

 

Start off with assembly language (that's what I did). Then you're really understand the fundamentals of what's going on "under the covers."

So far... assembly (various processors), C, C++, PHP, Perl, BASIC, Java and various other minor languages. CP/M, CP/M-86, MS-DOS, Windows 286 through XP, Linux, and a wee bit of Solaris, BSD and VMS as the platforms, not including the "non-OS" platforms such as Apple DOS and CBM.

I'll have to disagree with offshore, at least with the programmers from India who came to the states. Out of all of them, I've only dealt with one who was a truely good programmer (hi Vishy!). Then again, the same can be said of most American programmers, they can't truly think outside the box.

 

I was going to suggest that, but I didn't want to overwhelm the poor guy

Your experience sounds like mine, Solaris is my favorite for the last 10 years...

 

Solaris is a rock solid system. We used it for a database cluster back when I was programming fault-tolerant banking applications (nothing like pulling the plug on a box that is half-way through a transaction and watching another box instantly pick up the remainder of the the transaction!).

I didn't really mean the thing about learning assembly, though it wouldn't hurt to at least take a look. C, in many ways, is high level assembly. The hacker in me (and I mean hacker, not cracker/phreaker) made me say the remark about assembly!

 

I recently (two years ago) built two Sunfire 4800 clusters (Prod and QA) using Veritas VCS (not quite the same thing as RAC), IBM ESS 800, etc. Then, they smartly decided to "in-source" the systems, so I had to move them from IBM's co-loc in Rochester to North Carolina, in stages. Fun!

C is EXACTLY high-level assembly. There is a direct correlation between the C code and what it becomes when compiled - as long as you don't optimize it, that is...

I once did an experiment, writing code to build a 3-D cube, line-drawing, and rotate it. Did this in x86 assembler, using quad-word integers (cheating) to do the math. Then, re-wrote it in C using floating-point (and didn't have a floating point chip in it, so it was all functions). There was only a 30% reduction in performance, and I attribute that to the difference between cheating with integers and C doing real floating operations. That sold me on C, and the only times I worked with assembler after that was to do low-level hardware stuff or really intense graphics operations (like line-drawing) directly with the video hardware.

Ken, you're a fellow hacker! And like you, I mean that in the old-fashioned sense, not the current break-and-enter type ... although I was a cracker, and phreaker, while I was still a "juvenile" using a 300 baud acoustic-coupler, many moons ago...

art k.

 

Ahh....

I had a 300 baud modem! Did my fair share of phreaking, and cracking (Apple ][) and a little on the PC.

Often times these days I'm willing to bet C code is faster than a lot of assembly, due to the ordering tricks that take advantage of how modern processors pipeline things. Do a Google search for Gibson Research. That man does some amazing Windows programming using pure assembly. He sells the best hard-drive data recovery utility, bar none, for the PC, and it'll fit on a floppy disk.

 

I had many a C64 or Vic-20 game that had a giant loading screen crediting the hacker(s) that "cracked" the serials on them. Most of them were free to download, but had to be "cracked" to play... So my uncle and a handfull of his friends did it.... It's pretty cool.. He ever wrote and distributed a game himself for a while. Smurfs Armageddon.... That game was cool.... It was either him or todd that wrote it.... Don't member now as all the old commodore equipment got thrown out when the floppy controllers went bad....

 

man i wish i knew what yall are talking about, it

does sound interesting.

 

Err...
*swallows*

Maybe I should become a damn good writer of fiction books....


Ya think?

But over time, stuff like this becomes simplified even if it takes an old school master to put things back to rights if chaos comes to town. GUI interfaces and stuff like that. I don't want to know it at an outside level, but the inside looks deeper than I had any idea.

I think this will only be a hobby in the long run by the looks of things.

I've understood stranger things though. (usually through hindsight)