User:GreatLord

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Introduction

Hi, my name is Magnus Olsen and I joined ReactOS because I saw a future for it, and because I like to do software programing.

Before ReactOS, I worked as teacher and hardware tech guy, repairing customers' PCs, taking care of RMAs, etc. Today I have my own small company, and I do software/web developing for my clients as well as work with PC hardware. I love programing software; I started when I was 8 or 9 years old, programing BASIC and R6502 on a C-64. After a while, I changed to Amiga and did most of my programing in Amos (a programing language similar to BASIC) with light M68000 assembler. When Commodore became unpopular, I changed to PCs at the begining of 1990 and I started looking for a good programing language.

I only found two, called ASIC and Intel ASM, ASIC was a bad programming language and you could not do anything really cool with it; it was very limited BASIC. One day, my uncle told me to learn C. I had been in contact with C before 1990 on Amiga; I had started learning it but gave up a few times. But now, I was forced to learn C, if I ever wanted to program software on PC. I had a hard time converting from BASIC to C. BASIC and C are two very different languages. For example, in BASIC you write software with goto, gosub, return, if, then, end, etc... it is the most basic syntax of BASIC. However, in C, to jump to a function you call it foo() instead using gosub and return. To go back to anywhere in BASIC, even to jump in the middle of a function, you can use gosub or goto. BASIC does not have programming concepts like functions or typse. Your whole programing logic needs to change and adapt. Thus, it was hard for me to change from BASIC to C and it took me over a year. After that, I was finally able to write software in it, and I am glad that I've changed to C. I hope that, some day, BASIC won't be used anymore; it is a really bad programing language and promotes bad logic, for the same reason that using goto is badly viewed in C. Code in BASIC is really hard to read for unskilled person.

What I am doing in ReactOS

I am working on different parts in ReactOS. My pet project in ReactOS is DirectX, I hope this year 2005 we can see some kind of DirectDraw support in ReactOS, but I do not know if it will come this year or next year.

Contact

Magnus Olsen

greatlord@reactos.org