Calling all Programmers...

vibrokatana said:
probably, though it is interesting to see what colleges pump out. People managed to go several semesters and barely know how to do basic programs, ugh.
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I wish they would teach the basic skills of proper requirements gathering, using version management, unit testing, build scripts, issue tracking and documenting. If I see another resume with someone submitting their poorly written Computer Science 101 Hello World final project as a professional code sample I might just blow up...
 
Where said:
think Nevi was talking more about the book than the language
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A bit. More generally, "for dummies" books tend to leave out important things like buffer safety or other security related topics which are more relevant in an "unsafe" environment (i.e. direct memory access...which you can in fact do in .NET, but anywhoo...)

I'd rather see a book called "10,001 ways to abuse strcpy"
 
Plankeye said:
I wish they would teach the basic skills of proper requirements gathering, using version management, unit testing, build scripts, issue tracking and documenting. If I see another resume with someone submitting their poorly written Computer Science 101 Hello World final project as a professional code sample I might just blow up...
Click to expand...

No doubt. I'm a little mixed right now as to if schools like DeVry are doing a better job. On one hand, as far as I can tell, they teach a more comprehensive approach like you outlined, but on the other - they tend to be not quite as strong in the fundamentals such as OOP, etc... then again, it could be equivalent to the difference between a CS and MIS degree...then again again...one of my best friends switched to MIS from CS and could give an example of polymorphism WITHOUT using the words "shape, animal, triangle, cat, dog".

Now that I think about it (which is likely corrupted due to being absurdly bored in the airport)...pure computer science, IMO, isn't really about a lot of the topics you mentioned - it's largely the science of algorithm development and analysis so maybe covering some of those topics isn't quite in scope for PURE computer scientists.

The bigger problem I see is that people are graduating without solid PROBLEM SOLVING skills (ok...and "experienced" developers too). You can have all the assembler experience you want, but if you can't efficiently solve the problem, there's really not much point in being there. Then again, I guess that's the fundamental difference between a programmer and a developer?


/discussmylongwindedpostinwhichiusedontheotherhandandthenagaintoomanytimeskthxbai!
 
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Okay, so I am thinking I might just jump on with C#, and I have C#.NET Visual Studio 2008 Beta, is this good to use, or should I start out in a basic IDE or code editor?
 
no, I'd go with Visual Studio 2008 beta. If you're hesitant about using the beta IDE you can go for the visual studio 2005 express.

Personally, I love VB.Net. It has all the power of C# or any other .NET language, but I find it tons easier to use....
 
I hate VB, it is too wordy for me and it tends to get very hard to read when you are doing some complex stuff. Besides I love brackets ;P VS express is perfectly fine, the problem is when you hit on a "feature" that happens to be excluded and you smack your head on it.

I was messing around with perl and found a really neat library called tidy:

Code: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use warnings;
use strict;

my $enable_tidy = 1;

#form variables passed to cgi
use CGI qw(:standard Vars);
use CGI::Carp qw(warningsToBrowser fatalsToBrowser);
my %FORM = Vars();

#Overall string storing the text going to be printed - do this such that it can be post processed as needed.
my $page_output = "<title>2<body>blah";


if($enable_tidy)
{
	use HTML::Tidy;
	my $tidy = HTML::Tidy->new( { output_xhtml => 1, tidy_mark => 0 } );
	$page_output = $tidy->clean($page_output);
}

print $page_output;

the amazing feat is that it transformed "<title>2<body>blah" into:
Code: 
$ perl content.cgi
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>2</title>
</head>
<body>
blah
</body>
</html>
*drool*, what is really nice is the mode that points out errors in the generation. Now I just need to figure out where the option is to generate the indenting...
 
I am very interested in Perl...C# doesn't really interest me from what I've seen...Java seems cool but hard...What fun can I have with Perl? I mostly wanna have fun with my language but be able to do things that might be required at work...

With Perl, can I create cool little apps like a Budget calculator or a date notifaction app, or something else that might be fun to maintain and give to friends? (lol...me = not much creativity...lol...)
 
Well im mostly using it as a web development platform, so Im not really dealing with anything but inputs through get and post (and mysql when I get the time to design a database).

The idea is to find something you either like doing or could benefit from. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, that is boring. I like to write web spiders, just for the fun of messing with regex and baffling web admins with weird user agents. I am laying the groundwork to work on a perl CMS that should be pretty fun. I already have a rewrite rule that basically passes someurl.com/content/somepagename to cgi-bin/something.cgi?content=somepagename

My biggest issue really is fitting a theme into a content management style system. I suck at theming websites.
 
You could always mess with AJAX, I use spry in a lot of things. It requires some understanding of javascript though, and you will need to know how to generate valid XML files (with virtually any language) for the content switching applications.

There are tons of stuff you can do, you can download the yahoo search API and mess around with it (it works with several languages), with a little work you can do fun stuff like spelling suggestions (via pspell in php or aspell in perl) or whatever.

Web development may seem a little tedious for those not used to it. You also have to worry about security as people can do SQL injection if you don't use the escape functions on the query, because people could insert whatever statements they want.
 
spry is interesting, but IMO, stay away from AJAX.Net. Personally, I prefer the Prototype library for my AJAX functionality.

As for VB being verbose, that just depends on yer POV.

For example: C#
Code: 
if (x==b) {
   do_something();
   do_something2();
   if (c==34) && (e==44) {
     do_something3();
   }
   else {
     do_something3_b();
   }
  }
}
in VB that's
Code: 
if x= b then
   do_something()
   do_something2()
    if c=34 andalso e=44 then
      do_something3()
    else
        do_something3_b()
    end if 
end if
Frankly, IMO, the VB code is just that much easier to read, as it's obvious what's the end of an IF statement, etc.

And for VB being simple, well, that just means you've not dug deep enough into it yet. There are multiple ways of doing nearly every operation in VB, some are simple and straightforward, at the cost of performance. But you can dig down deeper and find more complex ways of performing a task which saves your performance.

Example:
Code: 
if IsNothing(foo) and isdbnull(foo) then 
do_something() 
end if
would be faster, and more efficient as this
Code: 
if foo is nothing andalso foo is dbnull.value then do_something
 
Kidan said:
no, I'd go with Visual Studio 2008 beta. If you're hesitant about using the beta IDE you can go for the visual studio 2005 express.

Personally, I love VB.Net. It has all the power of C# or any other .NET language, but I find it tons easier to use....
Click to expand...

It actually doesn't :) Unmanaged code for eample, is something VB.NET can't do, while late binding (without reflection) is something VB.NET can do (and I would smack whoever uses it)


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308470
 
Kidan said:
As for VB being verbose, that just depends on yer POV.
Click to expand...

++ or -- to that ! oh, vb can't do that ;)

there used to be a lot of compiler differences that made perfomance differences between the two - so, VB was definitely more verbose at the IL level for a while. I believe this has changed quite a bit between 1.x and 2.0, but I assume there still are some differences.
 
Code: 
if ( x == b ) 
{
   do_something();
   do_something2();

   if ( c == 34 ) && ( e == 44 )
   {
     do_something3();
   }
   else
   {
     do_something3_b();
   }
}
That is how I would format it, the brackets under the statements leads to much better reading. Also for single statements you can drop the brackets to use less space.

ex:
Code: 
if ( something )
   blah();
else
{
   while( blaaah() )
      cout << "Haxer!" << endl;
}

VS actually does the brackets under the statement by default. I use a modified version of the ANSI standard of layout across everything I write. The main difference being that I indent whenever there are brackets, because I find it easier to read.

I don't like how VB relies on the if/end if type system, closing brackets is much, much easier IMO.
 
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