• Smogon Premier League is here and the team collection is now available. Support your team!

programmers unite

Hm...

First thing I ever programmed was Lego Robotics. That thing was and is fantastic, though I doubt many people here have used it. It introduced me to basics extremely well, and the result was making cars that could follow a track or do a flip every minute or something like that. I then moved on to my calculator, where I programmed some stuff to help me solve math problems and then moved on to code a really shitty version of snake. I never figured out how I could get my calculator to erase the tail of the snake as it moved along...

Moved to java. Most of the stuff I've programmed there has been for classwork. I began programming a replacement for netbattle at one point in java as a special project after completing my school's java ap, the only ap computer course they offer. I abandoned that once I realized that java held no advantages over c++ for windows and I have no desire to ever use a mac in my life.

Outside of that, I've done a lot of messing around small projects in java...I've made various pokemon tools for my own use. The only one I ever found useful enough to use in serious matches was a combination pokemon tracker, damage calculator, and ev checker. By calculating damage done to your pokemon, it would be able to calculate your opponents evs (or at least a close approximation because of the random number) and therefore predict future damage dealt by those pokemon with great accuracy.

Over the past year I haven't programmed much at all. I do a lot of scripting for Ragnarok Online servers. Most of it is miscellaneous stuff, one project which is nearly complete (and has been for a long period of inactivity) is an adaptation of Mafia for Ragnarok. It's a bit more fun to play Mafia when the person who gets lynched has a fucking meteor land on his head.

Starting in September I'm going to be taking a year long independent study in artificial intelligence. My ultimate goal would be to create a bot which could consistently beat me in DOTA. Failing that, one which could consistently beat me in a much simpler game such as pokemon would be quite nice as well.
 
I have more of an interest in programming than practical skills at this point, but I do have some knowledge of C++ and a bit of Ruby.
 
tl;dr, I know.

I worry about my lack of knowledge in regards to programming. For some reason here, the ICT you do is useful for say, working in an office, but doesn't really set you up for university.
I actually voiced this concern but I was told by someone who works in a university that it just happens to be the case and everyone enters the courses with similar educational backgrounds in that case. Obviously, some would have already researched programming and taken it up personally, outside of school.

I actually got the chance to take part in one class and I seemed to know more than the people that I got to work with and actually helped them in a few instances. We were using Macromedia something or other and the syntax and commands were very similar to Actionscript which I'm not terribly profficient in.

I'd like to take up computer science and I'd like to learn a language soon. It would feel like a great achievement to me because it's been something I'm very impressed by. I know for people like chaos, it seems to be second nature (at least I'm guessing by the level of ability and amount of success) but whenever I've taken it into my head to learn something such as Java or C++, I've lost motivation and generally give up.

The best I've done is work in Access and that's not real programming at all.
I'm not sure of what action to take but it remains an occasional worry.

I used to really like mIRC script, though. I knew a guy who was brilliant at it and he eventually got to work on C++ and I remember being blown away by the text-RPG he made.
 
Nate said:
Starting in September I'm going to be taking a year long independent study in artificial intelligence. My ultimate goal would be to create a bot which could consistently beat me in DOTA. Failing that, one which could consistently beat me in a much simpler game such as pokemon would be quite nice as well.
Click to expand...
For a homework assignment once, I wrote a bot that could beat me 100% of the time in a game called Mahn Kahla (or something like that). That was fairly embarassing...
 
My first experience with programming was in Shop class in 7th grade. Me and one other kid had to program a robotic arm to grab little barrels off of a moving conveyor belt.

Nate said:
First thing I ever programmed was Lego Robotics. That thing was and is fantastic, though I doubt many people here have used it.
Click to expand...

I actually did use Lego Robotics; however, it was the Star Wars (lol) version so it was a bit gimped. All it really did was respond to light and change the spin of the motor every few seconds. I guess that doesn't really count, but the R2-D2 I built was fucking awesome.

I took a QBASIC class in 8th grade, which was alright. I didn't really learn much, because I mostly dicked around with the colors of the interface and stared at the girls in the class across the hall.

All I really do now is HTML and CSS web dev stuff. Not too impressive, compared to the ace programmers around here.
 
I started learning C++ at age 12 from a book. I read it all the way through but I didn't really make anything with it, because trivial programs didn't interest me and I had no idea what an API was, so I couldn't bridge the gap between the material I was learning and actually useful programs (I wanted to make video games eventually). I essentially sat on my C++ knowledge for many years after this time.

I learned mIRC scripting at 14, and I wrote a GSC battling simulator for IRC called neobot. I ended up writing two iterations of this because the first iteration uncovered a lot of design flaws, naturally. The second iteration was almost fully functional, with only a few of the obscure moves missing.

At 16 I started writing the first iteration of Competitor, with chaos' guidance. I recalled my long dormant C++ knowledge and started writing Competitor in C. I didn't know anything practical though and this was mostly chaos writing the core stuff and me learning and expanding with what he had. This was before NetBattle had an advance mode, and a lot of people expected Competitor to dominate NetBattle, but once that summer ended and I started my senior year of high school, the project died.

I'm now 19 and in my second year of Software Engineering at UVic, and my programming skills have increased pretty much 100-fold. I'm one of 4 developers on Competitor, and THIS time the project is being properly managed. For school, I'm currently working on a simplified version of Civilization for a final project (using Java).

The area I've spent most of my time thinking about is game design, however. I have a 2D action RPG that I'm hoping to release in a few years. I've already spent a couple years working on both the game design and the technological concepts for it, and as my software knowledge has increased, this work has become more and more concrete. If the project comes to fruition, I'll need some beta testers...
 
I developed an app that shows my opponent's team (detailed) in NetBattle just with a double click. And an MD5 decrypter that uses up to 4 cpu cores.

/me hides
 
chaos' tl;dr post is quite intimidating, for someone who is interested in learning to program but knows nearly nothing.

What the fuck was I doing at 11? N64 and that's about it ?_?

On topic, last Christmas I got JavaScript for dummies (lol) and, yeah...
 
I used to know a decent bit of VB back in the day, and all this talk of programming in the IRC got me re-interested in it. chaos had a lot to say positive about Python, so I thought, hey, why not?
 
I just started "learning" Python today...but my first script doesn't work ;_; Stupid "AREA CALCULATION PROGRAM". Are there any particularly good tutorials or exercises I can do to practice my skills? Bear in mind I literally downloaded Python about 2 hours ago and haven't ventured further than "elif" and "else" syntax...
 
I'm a 21 year old senior CS major (I don't wanna graduate!) and had absolutely no experience with programming whatsoever before starting school. Since then I've had two jobs programming and being a co-system administrator for some factories over the summer (IS SUCKS ARGHGGHGHGHGH i d 10 t errors are too annoying) but nothing as interesting as the others.

I can't really think of anything else to talk about without it sounding like wankery. Oh, and I hate Java, and schools need to stop making it everyone's first language. Because it sucks.
 
I started around age 12 with a library checkout of "Beginning Programming for Dummies." It used "Liberty BASIC" which is sort of a QBASIC clone except modernized for Windows. One thing led to another, and I can use, to varying potentials ranging from "barely" to "somewhat fluent":

* Perl (because everyone likes writing @fdsfar = ($*fakubgr, $aaa); $djarorio ~= s/u^/mycake/; # the only bad part is reading it; not even I know what the hell this abomination does)
* Python (I'll have to agree with chaos for this one; Python's gigantic standard library and elegant syntax make it useful for damn near anything.)
* sh (pretty much required if you want to power-use Linux)
* LOGO (the Berkeley Logo dialect; it actually amounts to LISP minus the S-expressions and plus a turtle)
* Boo (a somewhat obscure language; take Python, target it to .NET, make it statically typed with an optional dynamic 'duck' type, change a few minor details (it's "def constructor" instead of "def __init__" for example), make the interactive shell slow as frozen hell, and you get Boo)

I still don't know C, mostly because it requires too much code bulk for mostly trivial programs and thus I can't really bother using it. I'm 15 now.


Dan Dan said:
I just started "learning" Python today...but my first script doesn't work ;_; Stupid "AREA CALCULATION PROGRAM". Are there any particularly good tutorials or exercises I can do to practice my skills? Bear in mind I literally downloaded Python about 2 hours ago and haven't ventured further than "elif" and "else" syntax...
Click to expand...

Python comes with a tutorial in the docs. You may want to try that.
 
I'm just learning Pascal for now, and this thread's replies are rather intimidating for me ._.

But chaos' love letter for Python made me interested in it... Where could I download any sort of guide or compilator?
 
not even I know what the hell this abomination does)
Click to expand...

nothing. to be fair, your example used a regular expression - a feature found in all modern languages.
 
Wizard said:
I developed an app that shows my opponent's team (detailed) in NetBattle just with a double click.
Click to expand...

I'd say 'awesome' to this if there wasn't this bugged nb patch which did the same thing. hmm.

edit: seems like you meant differently! awesome.
 
I suppose I can consider myself as being a programmer as well.

I have a first degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. I can program in basically any programming language given a few hours of learning its syntax. I have experience in programming using BASIC, Pascal, Java, and functional programming languages, and I also know a bit of Ansi-C and Prolog.

I had also written a game, CubeX, in Pascal, at around 1999-2001, together with several (smaller) games and programs. I once gave this game to Sarenji, lol.

Actually, currently I'm thinking about writing a program that recompresses compressed files using linear congruental RNGs (inspired by loadingNOW's Emerald research). If I manage to make it work, I suppose it'll have a huge range of applications. *smirk*
 
hmm i started learning c++ about a month ago, studing pointers atm :justin2:, theyre by far the most time requiering part of c++ i have studied so far, but im getting the idea pretty well :naughty:, the only thing i have programmed is a tool to administrate your phone numbers, but i plan on programming a lot when i finish to study the languaje properly
on topic: well ive heard that java is better than c++ when it comes to home applications, ive seen some java sources and it is hella similar to c++, but in my experience (with azureus lol) its waaay slower and having to download the runtime environment just plain suck, but again thats the opinion of a newbie to c++
 
I would never use Java over C++.

The thing that was nice about Java initially was its surprisingly clean syntax. Recent versions of Java introduced template syntax from C++, kind of eliminating that last line of "okay Java is cool I guess" to me. I see no reason to use Java over C++, ever, as Java is simply huge, slow, and memory-hogging. Write-once-run-everywhere, so what? It doesn't take that much effort to do it in C++ too, and even the slowest and worst written cross-platform C++ library isn't going to have as much overhead as any Java application will have.
 
But was the syntax really CLEAN? Before "generics" (which aren't as powerful as templates), you had to explicitly upward cast Object to whatever type you stored in there. If that's not error prone, redundant programming, I don't know what is. I consider clean language design more akin to a scripting language like Python or Ruby or a regular language like Lisp/Smalltalk.
 
As a student of Java for far too long, I see no reason to ever use Java over C++. Java was hailed as the great solution to compatibility issues between Macs and PCs. This is becoming less and less of an issue as macs can run boot camp and most c++ programs can be ported. Java consumes far more resources and runs slower than similar programs in C++. It also doesn't maintain a clean-looking gui on windows or mac without huge customization.

What is there to like about java? No pointers...that's about all I can think of. The syntax has always been easy to use and extremely quick to rap out small coding projects, but anything I would dream of releasing to the public would not be coded in java.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top