User:ThePhysicist/blog
Hi,
Here's my pseuddeveloper's blog...
What it's all about
Why a pseudo developer's blog? I don't know! I just like to tell you what I#m waorking on.
Who am I?
Just look at About Me
My general programming knowledge
I first started progrmming, at the age of about 11 or so, when my brother got a C128. I quickly started programming very "basic" things. In C128 BASIC. Then I recognized the assembler monitor in the C128. I read in the manual about it and tried to program, but 8 bit assembler was not very usable for me ;-) Later I worked on my father's PC. I quickly startet writing programs in ASM. One of the first programs i wrote, was a program to calculate the square root of 2 up to 32000 digits. I fisrt started with the newton algorithm, but it took too long on a 80086. So my first real informatics/mathmatics work started. I created an optimized (still using a 10 digits system) code was born. It calculated the squareroot of 2 with 32000 digits an a 80068 machine in few hours. My classmates were impressed about these lots of papers showing numbers wich I printed out. Later, when we had a modem at home, I got used to "email", wich was at this time only messages on the FidoNet. You were able to write messages to other people and newsgroups. That was something like internet is now. Most "points" (people just recieving mail, not having a server) used a program called Xpoint (CrossPoint), it was able to download the messages and write new ones and showed them in a quite good gui (more than 80 charachter per row!) But I started creating my own BBS-system (Bulletin Board System, a mailbox, some kind of ANSI based telnet, ANSI makes it possible to show all ASCII charachters even in different fore-/background colors). I set up a program called LORA, wich also allowed downloading and reading of newsgroups and provate messages. But there was no good editor to use this feature. So I began to write a mail reading program, called MrEd, wich was written fully in ASM and was able to read a whole bunch of mail files like LORA / PIP / JAM / QBBS and more and it's gui was like XPoint. It never got finished, because some things were changing faster than my code. Some time later most people used windows and their mail came from the intrnet, that was the death of my great project :-( Later I started programming with Pascal. First with 16bit TurboPacal from Borland. I wrote some Windows applications and learned how Windows works. But Borland Pascal didn't take the time and you coudn't use modern (Win95/98) things. So I got a little bored of BorlandPascal. Then I had the chance to get a student's edition of MS VB for free! That was great. This was my first time working with object oriented code (is this the right translation?). It was very easy to learn. And in my opinion the best way to learn OOP if you don't know C++. But the programs were slow and you had to put a huge dll to your programs if want to give them to other people. Then I heard about FreePascal and got back to Pascal. It's great. A free 32bit Pascal compiler. But I quickly learned that it was in no way "borland compatible"! I had to work a lot on my old borland pascal programs to make them finally compile with FreePascal. Then it was time for my informatics studies (being a part of my physics studies) to teach me how to work with OOP. We first started with pretty unknown languages and implemented our own objects. Later we learned programming in Java. That was my first contact with the C sytax, I've always hated and still don't like. Most of my fellow students said to me, if you really want to program you have to use linux and C++. I never understood this. I don't like linux and i don't like C++. I remember installing Suse linux on an old PC, because a friend told me that it was soo fast. After hours of selecting packages with cryptic names, I finally got it done. And it was so damn slow, I couldn't believe it. Win98 was 10 times faster. My friend said to me: "That's just because you didn't compile your kernel" and that was enough for me. I was used to install an OS and then it works. I didn't want to compile it! But I tried to learn "C++ in 48 days". After reading some pages I was so irritated, I stopped it. I was used to Pascal, wich is a great language and then had to get used to this "&a->b()*x|s&&y{}" language. Arrrgh! I still don't understand what was in their head when Dennis Ritchie und Brian Kerningham invented C. Maybe they were drunk ;-) German readers: see links below. When I first read about ROS, I thought WOW! That's great, that's what I've always been looking for. And now updating svns quite regular and having set up a devCpp / gcc, and looking into the C code, I started to understand how C works. (I still have no Clue about C++, some people say it's easier to program in C++, but I prefer the old fashioned non-objective way of programming, because I like to know what the computer is really doing. Objective programming is like using a calculator to calculate sin(2.323) without even knowing what sin is.)
