if (forumite == interested)then {discuss programing} else {GTFO} end if

[Necronic]

I thought it would be cool to have a place to discuss programming. Currently I am learning/doing a lot of programming for work and school. The programming I do is very simple stuff, for the most part, but I enjoy it greatly. Its almost all math programming with a little data management. Here are the languages I know/use/used to know and may still know.


C#/Java - this was the first language I learned in. I haven't used it in a long time, to be honest it is too cludgy for me. I prefer something more direct like...

Fortran77 - 25 commands and I can run the world. I sincerely believe every programmer should start with this language. It contains most of the standard concepts like loops, conditionals, arrays, and subfunctions/modules, but avoids the complicated issues like pointers, recursion, inheritence, and overloading.

VBA - the rodney dangerfield of the rodney dangerfield. It may get no respect but for business computing it is crazy useful. I have been using it to manage datafiles/build databases

SQL - not exactly a programming language, but similar in mentallity. I am not great with this, and am having a hard time learning it to be honest.

and finally

Matlab - I am new to this language but I am simply astounded at how brutally powerful it is for the math programming I do. I feel like Mike Tyson eating a salad of polynomial ears when I use it.


anyways, thought others might enjoy this thread. Any other programmers out there? Also, I would suggest people not get up their own ass with "that's not a programming language that's a scripting language!" and all that stuff, because at the end of the day someone somewhere could say the same about you (like C++ is high level compared to assembly, and I do know people that code in assembly.)

 

[Ross]

I loves me some programming of all types...

My ammunition:

Web: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, some PHP

Programming: C++, C, Java, Assembly, some VB, MatLab (I bow down to this), GrADS (imaging software), FORTRAN90

And I only minored in Comp Sci :shocked: (granted, I did learn some of this on my own)

Edit: Also know some programming for Windows Batch files... handy stuff for auto-organizing your files on your hard drive and timestamping.

 

[Dave]

10 Print Fuck Programming
20 Goto 10

 

[Covar]

10 Print Fuck Programming
20 Goto 10

Once again your avatar is full of win.


I'm a Senior in Computer Science and have a job with IBM working on software. I know quite a bit of different languages, but at the end of the day knowing how to program is much more important than knowing a specific language.

Scripting languages are still a form of programming, Markup languages are not (unless it's something like ant which uses XML to execute commands, or JACL which is really the same thing).

http://stackoverflow.com <-- great site for asking questions.

 

[Element 117]

10 Print Fuck Programming
20 Goto 10

SET r1, LMAO
SET r2, MINUTES
LOOP1TOP:
...
SUB r1, r1, r2
CMP r1, r0
JMP NEQ, LOOP1TOP

SET r2, 20
LOOP2TOP:
LOAD r1, X
CMP r1, r2
JMP EQ, LOOP2END
...
LOOP2END:

 

[PatrThom]

Haven't programmed in anything mainstream in ages. The entirety of my 'known' languages is:
BASIC, Pascal, DCL, and GSL. Haven't needed to learn anything new since then, so haven't done more than dabble in JavaScript (This page isn't doing what I want! I'll just copy the source and modify it a little...) or Applescript (This almost does what I need, if it only did this, too) or RealBasic (This is cool! If only I had the time to explore it).

Still not sure if I want to learn some flavor of C next, or just go straight to Assembly.

--Patrick

 

[tegid]

10 Print Fuck Programming
20 Goto 10

I use extensively Fortran77, Matlab and other such programs (Mathematica, Maple)

I want to learn me some C in the near future (maybe switch to it from Fortran for the programs I write for my master's and PhD).

 

[Tinwhistler]

VBA - the rodney dangerfield of the rodney dangerfield. It may get no respect but for business computing it is crazy useful. I have been using it to manage datafiles/build databases

Ain't that the freaking truth. Same goes for VB.

I am a VB/VB.NET programmer, and I never get any respect. But I chalk it up to the same phenomenon that makes all poseur musicians gravitate toward drums: The low barrier for entry means that the very bad at it can get their feet wet.

I once had the pleasure of replacing an EBCDIC to ASCII converter that some guy wrote in C++. It was wonky and only worked half the time. The guy was an OOP methodology zealot. made EVERYTHING an object, even things that really required simple, straight code. It was a console app..you gave it a file path of an EBCDIC file, and it returned a file path of the ascii coverted file. We were converting gigabytes of railroad commission files, and the thing would run for hours. After that, we still hadda run a bunch of manual conversions and things to get this big text file in a format we could use.

Anyway, i replaced it with VB6 code. My VB6 code was stable, and had bells and whistles: a visual progress bar, the ability to parse the data for the various databases we used it with, the ability to check for exceptions against pre-existing data (we were merging well-head data from the RR commission with what we had), and the ability to backup and FTP the data to our other data center, reporting. All with a point and click. The process went from one that took a technical person to nurse it through to one that a minimum-wage monkey could do most of the time.

And the best part? My code was significantly faster than his. The week I debuted my re-write, my boss said "You know, I never really considered VB a real programming language until now."

 

[Necronic]

I think OOP has its places but a lot of the time it is simply massive overkill. My java/C# classes really illustrated that to me. I spent a year studying and then realized at the end that I couldn't actually write a program . This isn't a knock on the class. It was fantastic, but we spent the entire time discussing OOP concepts and then deeper data structure concepts or memory management issues, but we almost never wrote a complete program (mainly classes/methods).

I want to learn me some C in the near future (maybe switch to it from Fortran for the programs I write for my master's and PhD).

you know what......

fuck C.

I said it.

Ok, to be honest its actually really useful, but I think too many programmers think it (or C++) is the end all be all of languages. For most of the programming I do it offers very little improved functionality or performance and introduces massive oppurtunities to fuck yourself in the face with that dildo from seven. Directly accessing memory locations comes to mind....

---------

I recently had a giant "no-shit sherlock" moment with my programming style. For the longest time I would write my code with most of my major variables set as public and modified within the method/module itself. It FINALLY clicked to me why that's often a really bad idea (negates the mutability of your code) and I swear my programming skills have gotten about 20 times better.

Although clearly the conditional argument in the OP has some problems with it. Somehow Dave snuck in. Must be something wrong with the 'forumite' data type, gonna look into that.

Oh yeah and has anyone ever seen this?

 

[tegid]

Hmm... So what would you recommend for simulations and other mathematical computations? (I guess I can safely stay with Fortran)

 

[Dave]

Somehow Dave snuck in.

I got in through your back door. Now you're my bitch.

 

[PatrThom]

I think OOP has its places but a lot of the time it is simply massive overkill

If you are writing something that will need revision over the course of its lifespan, OOP is a really good way to go. If you're just coding up a command line utility that will be written once and then used via pipe thousands of times, go for as tight as possible.

Oh yeah and has anyone ever seen this? (languages image)

I don't think I had. Have you seen this? I found it interesting.

Comparison of languages based on complexity, speed, and code size

--Patrick

 

[tegid]

I think OOP has its places but a lot of the time it is simply massive overkill

If you are writing something that will need revision over the course of its lifespan, OOP is a really good way to go. If you're just coding up a command line utility that will be written once and then used via pipe thousands of times, go for as tight as possible.

Oh yeah and has anyone ever seen this? (languages image)

I don't think I had. Have you seen this? I found it interesting.

Comparison of languages based on complexity, speed, and code size

--Patrick[/QUOTE]

Very interesting! Something to take into those 'your programming language is obsolete and stupid' discussions, definitely.

 

[strawman]

Yay! I hang out on Stackoverflow too ( http://stackoverflow.com/users/2915/adam-davis ) though had to break that addiction (Hi, I'm Adam Davis, and I'm a stackoverflowaholic. (group: Hi Adam!) I've been stackoverflow free for uh... 5 days...).

I'm a C guy, but I've programmed in many languages. As far as I'm concerned there's no one true language - they are each a tool, and the more tools you have in your toolbag, the better programmer you are. Each language has taught me something new about computer science and programming. "If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail."

I primarily stick to C due to my work in embedded systems - computers that go into cars, thermostats, tracking systems, etc. It is the de facto language of choice for small systems programming, primarily because you have to work with the hardware directly (ie, yes, you can shoot yourself in the foot, but sometimes the project requirements include the ability to shoot yourself in the foot...).

It's all fun stuff though.

 

[MindDetective]

I'm pretty fluent in Visual Basic 6. I can stumble through VB.NET but I hate it immensely. They ruined a perfectly easy, "powerful enough" language when they went to .NET. I've recently started learning Java because I want a cross-platform language. Mostly it is a pain in the ass trying to wrap my head around classes and familiarizing myself with the syntax and import libraries that I may need to use frequently. I feel that I will program much slower in Java than in VB, even if I become equally proficient in the language. I do wish VB was genuinely cross-platform but I also like the idea of developing experiment software (even if just in-house) for the iPad and iPhone down the line.

 

[Necronic]

that is pretty cool. Funny where python ended up.

Also, didn't mean to knock C (well, I guess I kind of did.) If you are doing serious programming that requires lots of efficiency then yeah, C makes tons of sense.

with regards to the earlier question about good languages for simulations...

I would say Matlab. You can do some pretty insane simulations in that. To be honest I am not entirely sure what you are trying to do though. Mathematical/scientific programming is kind of funky because at some points it makes sense to completely leave the programming environment. I may write a program to do generate data or parse it from controllers, but it may make more sense to bust out something like Minitab or JMP to analyze it.

BTW, JMP is the single greatest statistical software in the world, it gets my seal of approval and is allowed to call be its "bitch" and do what it wants. Good god I love that program. Minitab is for old people who are scared of innovation, interactive graphs, and colors.

Oh yeah......forgot to mention one of my new beasts I am trying to wrangle:

Labview.

 

[MindDetective]

First I've heard of JMP. I may have to try the free trial and maybe get an instructor copy. Almost anything is better than SPSS and I don't want to muck around with programming scripts, like in R.

 

[Necronic]

oh god yes. If you use things like that you should definitely get JMP. The only thing I may counter myself with is to say that SPSS may be more useful for things like psychological studies. I don't know if that's true but its what I've heard.

 

[MindDetective]

ANOVAs, Regression Analysis, t-tests, Chi-squared analyses...if I can't do those then JMP won't be of much help to me, except to graph means and standard error.

 

[Necronic]

........

........

yeah jmp can do those.

Let me describe a session.

I have a set of data. 4 variables. I do a scatter plot of the first 2.

With my linear regression I get an ANOVA. No wait. I want a blox plot of the second variable categorized by the first. No wait. I want a gaussian overlayed on the linear regression. Ok.

I color the scatter plot by the 3rd variable. I assign shapes by the 4th.

I add the 95% confidence intervals of the standard error. No wait, I want the confidence intervals for the Standard Error of the Mean.

hmmmm.....

Those points over there are clearly outliers. Let me circle them with my mouse and delete/hide them. Oh neat. The ANOVA and confidence intervals corrected themselves.

I think there are other influences here.

Lets do a multi-dimensional regression.

Screw it, lets do DOE. 15 variables. 6 are non-linear. 2 are uncontrollable. 5 have confounding/crossed influences. Lets do it boxed, partial factorial.
......

Long story short, if this software can't do it then its not worth doing. God. I am so turned on right now. Just watch the videos in the demo section.

http://www.jmp.com/software/

 

[tegid]

Screw it, lets do DOE. 15 variables. 6 are non-linear. 2 are uncontrollable. 5 have confounding/crossed influences. Lets do it boxed, partial factorial.

http://www.jmp.com/software/

Fuck, this is like half of what I need right now. I'll have to look into this, maybe try to get my boss to buy a license.

 

[bhamv3]

I started learning programming with C.

It turned me off programming for life and left me mentally scarred.

Actually, that's not quite true, I learned C and it turned me off programming, but I wasn't mentally scarred until I came across Fril.

On the bright side, I still have the Eliza program I wrote with Fril somewhere around here. It'll drive you bonkers.

 

[Haeri]

I learned some HTML in elementary school, for fun. Later some javascript to top it off, but have barely touched it since. When I got my TI-84+ calculator I quickly learned (TI-)basic, and spent most of my classes having fun with that, but I was quickly frustrated by how incredibly slow and ineffective it ran on the poor little device, so I decided to dive into the only other option... assembly.

Well, that threw me off programming hard. Getting back in there, though.

 

[Necronic]

I am putting together a presentation at work for our safety meeting on Computer Security and I was thinking of putting in a joke bit of code on the Malware section:

If (cough == true) then
{
Computer.hasVirus = true
If(Diagnose(computer) == Bad))
Computer.OldYeller
}

Can anyone think of some funnier stuff (work appropriate) to put in there?

 

[papachronos]

http://www.jmp.com/software/

Holy shit, where was this when I was doing my MS thesis? I wouldn't have had to struggle with the damned EXCEL STATISTICS ADDON. (Seriously, don't ask).

Anyway, yeah, heavy use of C and assembly for data collection, Fortran77/Matlab/Excel for aggregation and analysis, and GEANT for Monte Carlo detector simulation. It's been a long time since I've had to do any real programming, though. Mostly I just do little scripts and batches to help with reports now.