I keep them separate. I used to do some hobby programming for Palm in C. Compiled on the Palm devices.
I only go to C these days when I hit 20K iterations or more while doing a stats run.
What Programming Languages do you use?
- Thread starter Leitz
- Start date
I keep them separate. I used to do some hobby programming for Palm in C. Compiled on the Palm devices.
I only go to C these days when I hit 20K iterations or more while doing a stats run.
ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
Me, too. I'll use C to speed things up more. And I use C when writing programs for my TI-89.
I selected 'other', which requests an explanation.
After growing to feel like a digital monk cloistered away and coding in the seclusion of FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/S, C, BASIC and several others whose names I have gratefully forgotten, I have come to the point where I feel that if it can't be done quick and dirty in an Excel spreadsheet, then I probably don't really need to do it ... I am overthinking the problem.
So currently, my 'programming' is done in Excel.
(and I am feeling MUCH better since rejoining the human race and abandoning the quest for the perfect solution in search of a problem. :rofl: )
After growing to feel like a digital monk cloistered away and coding in the seclusion of FORTRAN, COBOL, PL/S, C, BASIC and several others whose names I have gratefully forgotten, I have come to the point where I feel that if it can't be done quick and dirty in an Excel spreadsheet, then I probably don't really need to do it ... I am overthinking the problem.
So currently, my 'programming' is done in Excel.
(and I am feeling MUCH better since rejoining the human race and abandoning the quest for the perfect solution in search of a problem. :rofl: )
Throwing this into it: professionally I used Databus (later called PL/B or Programming Language For Business) for about a decade, then the Datapoint hardware pretty much collapsed, as did the CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier - what happened when AT&T got broken up) which was the primary market. Switched to PL/B on Sun Unix & Windows (Unix was the file server, Windows the GUI front end; same language but Windows had GUI stuff. took a bit to get used to event driven software); then started on C# as we migrated. Eventually this all fell apart as well s I was working for a cellular company back when there was a different cell company everywhere. After that I went full time to to the dark side and C# / Web / Windows stuff, as well as a few scripting things such as Lua [which is really cool BTW]
Now I've switched (not by choice exactly) and I'm in an Apple shop with Filemaker. Which is just ugh. But doing that, some Apple scripts, and FM is moving into the 21st century. Eventually I plan on using Ruby - the other side of this company uses a Ruby On Rails web site, and we need to start merging things as there is some overlap.
At home I'm trying to keep up with C# and wherever the ? Microsoft is going. As per the 2017 resolution thread, I plan on having a Traveller Universal Windows pgm in the App store by the end of the year. Best laid plans and all that though....
Now I've switched (not by choice exactly) and I'm in an Apple shop with Filemaker. Which is just ugh. But doing that, some Apple scripts, and FM is moving into the 21st century. Eventually I plan on using Ruby - the other side of this company uses a Ruby On Rails web site, and we need to start merging things as there is some overlap.
At home I'm trying to keep up with C# and wherever the ? Microsoft is going. As per the 2017 resolution thread, I plan on having a Traveller Universal Windows pgm in the App store by the end of the year. Best laid plans and all that though....
So currently, my 'programming' is done in Excel.
Are you writing custom VBA functions and macros in Excel?
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Wintertree
SOC-6
If he is, that's programming by any stretch of the imagination.
By the way, thanks to y'all, there are now two new keywords in TBL: .HEXIFY, as described earlier, and .ATTACH, mostly to handle the results from .HEXIFY more intuitively.
So you could do (excerpt here):
Code:
.ROLL <2d6>
.HEXIFY {$Roll} TO {HexTemp}
.ATTACH {HexTemp} AFTER {HexString}At the moment the first argument after .ATTACH must be a variable because I just wanted to get the command in there. At some point I'll set it up to handle complete strings, too, like the predicate of a .JOIN command.
I definitely need less caffeine or more sleep; now I'm wondering if there's any use for octal values in TableMaster ... aside from random TOPS-10 PPNs, I can't think of any application.
Okay, I feel old ... I can't remember my current phone number without thinking about it ... I can't remember my mother's phone number at all without looking it up ... but I remember my CompuServe login PPN *and* password from 20+ years ago. There's something a bit disturbing about that.
Speaking of things that are programming languages but don't look like it ... who here remembers TECO from back in the DEC days? Among the stranger things I've ever encountered was an implementation of ELIZA written in TECO. Not by me, mind you -- I never used the thing for anything more than editing, and not even that once I got my hands on EDT. (my fingers could probably remember the EDT keypad commands by muscle memory) But theoretically you could do anything in TECO ... and probably had to. I've been told that EMACS started its life as a bunch of TECO macros, and I'd believe it. They're both cryptic, incomprehensible, complicated, and make me swear.
Another reason I feel old: remembering the days before full-screen editors. (and they're not good memories)
Rambling down memory lane again, the first incarnation of TableMaster had a debug mode (conditional compilation) where it would dump out the contents of the insanely complicated mess of linked lists that held the table data. The old Turbo Pascal, that came on a 5.25" floppy, didn't have anything like a debugger; that was the only way to see what was going on in there. When I upgraded to Borland Pascal, it had a debugger but it was such a pain to use I stayed with my existing print statements. Ah, the good old days ... they were terrible.
Any time I have a lingering trace of nostalgia, I remember those print statements, and laying out yards of fanfold printouts on a table and marking them up with multi-colored highlighters. I'll keep my nostalgia for my vintage postcard collection; when it comes to software, I'm happy to be rid of it.
HP RPN is also a programming language. I think the fundamental distinction is that of logic branching; once you get there, you're more programming language than imperative command language.
TI's algebraic entry also has emergent PL qualities, as you can write macros in it, too.
We're in 100% agreement.
Wintertree
SOC-6
Something that I'm finding interesting and rather heartening:
For a while, it looked like nobody but us geeks would ever write any actual code. The days are long gone when BASIC was included with MS-DOS and a decent compiler didn't cost more than my car. But programmy things are turning up all over. I remember talking to someone a while back who wrote some really complicated Excel macros. I complimented them on the programming, and they said "oh, I can't program; these are just some macros I wrote." Little bits of programminess have crept in all over the place. Macros for office programs, mods for computer games, all sorts of odds and ends. It's a good sign. They might not going to write 10,000-line C++ programs any time soon, but they've got at least a basic feel for how to do it without realizing that's what they're doing.
ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
There's QB64 for those that prefer the old MS-DOS-style of BASIC programming still. And the current Microsoft Visual Studio is free these days for programming in whatever language/device you prefer using.
I use gcc for my coding these days. I'm not much for integrated coding environments.
In contrast, I remember when Turbo Pascal started to bust out, and the several hundred dollar Microsoft C compiler started to tumble. My boss always asked why Turbo Pascal could be sold so cheap, and I pointed out that it was the only compiler on the top 10 list of PC software by volume...
It's been something like 20 years since I paid for software development tools...
Of course I don't think I've done any Windows programming since Windows '95 (and never really did that much Windows programming anyway). These days, if I need to whip up a quick program for my gaming needs, I write it in gcc on my Linux VM.
Erwhat? Windows has come with with VBScript since 1996, which is much more capable than QBasic ever was. I learned Python and developed GUI apps for free on Windows back in 2004 using free downloads. Before that I was playing around with C# using the free SharpDevelop IDE in 2001, which is now MonoDevelop. Even before that I was compiling utilities from source using GNU C.
Freely available professional grade development tools have been a hallmark feature of the Internet age. Back when I was a student in the late 80s things were very different. Yes you got Basic for free, but anything more than that was out of reach on a student budget. That really started changing in the 90s. Macs have come with freely available development tools either bundled or downloadable from day one of the OSX era. All the mainstream web development platforms - C, Perl, Python, PHP, have been free from the earliest days. Java was free from day 1 in 1995. Nowadays on Windows there's even a free version of Visual Studio. The internet era has been a young CS student's paradise compared to the DOS era.
Having said that, I'm getting set up with a visual studio subscription at work because enterprise/lockdown/approved software only policy, blah, blah. But there's nothing I want to do that technically requires that. The only development tool I've bought in the last 20 years is Pythonista on my iPad and at £10 it's a steal. Tons of fun. Ive used it to write a few games with my kids, a web service proof of concept, and a custom compression utility that was part of a test for a job application. Been a while since I did any binary bit twiddling.
Simon Hibbs
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ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
I bought the Enterprise Edition of Visual Studio 6.0 nearly 20 years ago. Very expensive. Used about 1/3 of it. ASM for MS-DOS was expensive too, that I recall.
In the '80s. I spent even more on developer software. 6 years ago, I started with Python. Have not bought any such software since, to do my programming in. I'm shocked at how much free (and how many) programming languages are out there now.
I've purchased BASIC-XL for the Atari 800, Action! for the Atari, the MAC/65, their C compiler (which was terrible -- I should say developing on C on the Atari was terrible). I also bought a $49 Forth implementation. Action! was amazing. Fast code, FAST editor. Really cool.
In 1985, I dropped $400 for a C compiler for the Macintosh. A far cry from the $49 for Turbo Pascal. Professionally I was doing work on VAXen and other minis, in BASIC, Pascal, C, Fortran -- whatever was handy. That was probably the last time I paid for development software. After that I used software provided by the company. Mostly business application stuff, though I was excited to get TurboC for our 386 back in the day (with REAL breakpoints! w00t).
I sold the Mac and bought a motorcycle, but I also had a TRS-80 Model 100, with it's BASIC.
My next machine was, well, a NeXT machine. So, it came with development software, plus I could download Everything on the internets (notably Perl at the time).
But on the PC, I was still developing in, mostly, Delphi. I didn't do much PC development, my stuff was all Unix based. Once I started writing internet stuff, I went from 4GLs to C++ using the GNU tools and vi. Later I moved us to Java, and I switch to Java, Ant, and Emacs.
I also did a .NET project using nothing but the free MS tools.
Today it's all Java, Netbeans, and Maven, save when I'm dabbling with 6502/816 assembly and Forth or p-code machines.
I marvel at the infrastructure we have. Free Java plus a free JEE server (and, specifically, it's in built transaction manager) combined with a free database like Postgres on a free operating system. Just stupid capable. Used to run 50 users on $100K machines less powerful than a $35 Raspberry pi.
In 1985, I dropped $400 for a C compiler for the Macintosh. A far cry from the $49 for Turbo Pascal. Professionally I was doing work on VAXen and other minis, in BASIC, Pascal, C, Fortran -- whatever was handy. That was probably the last time I paid for development software. After that I used software provided by the company. Mostly business application stuff, though I was excited to get TurboC for our 386 back in the day (with REAL breakpoints! w00t).
I sold the Mac and bought a motorcycle, but I also had a TRS-80 Model 100, with it's BASIC.
My next machine was, well, a NeXT machine. So, it came with development software, plus I could download Everything on the internets (notably Perl at the time).
But on the PC, I was still developing in, mostly, Delphi. I didn't do much PC development, my stuff was all Unix based. Once I started writing internet stuff, I went from 4GLs to C++ using the GNU tools and vi. Later I moved us to Java, and I switch to Java, Ant, and Emacs.
I also did a .NET project using nothing but the free MS tools.
Today it's all Java, Netbeans, and Maven, save when I'm dabbling with 6502/816 assembly and Forth or p-code machines.
I marvel at the infrastructure we have. Free Java plus a free JEE server (and, specifically, it's in built transaction manager) combined with a free database like Postgres on a free operating system. Just stupid capable. Used to run 50 users on $100K machines less powerful than a $35 Raspberry pi.
Even the free tiers on major cloud services like Amazon, Google App Engine, Heroku etc are plenty powerful enough for a lot of hobby use. Here's an example, it's a CT ship designer app.
https://tca-2014-12.herokuapp.com
Written using free tools on a free hosting service. My own desktop app was written in Python, using the QT GUI framework, both for free, and the code is hosted for free on an industrial grade version control repository. The Windows executable download is even hosted on my free Dropbox account.
I was talking to a friends' son who recently graduated with a CS degree and was having a hard time getting a job. So I asked him if he had any projects on the go, GitHub account, Stack Overflow profile and a developer ID for the Android store as he has an Android phone. No, no, no and no. I told him nobody has to give you permission to be a developer these days. If you want to be a dev, just go and do it. Build up a portfolio of little apps and projects, or contribute to an existing open source project. Go to a job interview at a dev shop with that to show off and they'll snap you up.
Simon Hibbs
https://tca-2014-12.herokuapp.com
Written using free tools on a free hosting service. My own desktop app was written in Python, using the QT GUI framework, both for free, and the code is hosted for free on an industrial grade version control repository. The Windows executable download is even hosted on my free Dropbox account.
I was talking to a friends' son who recently graduated with a CS degree and was having a hard time getting a job. So I asked him if he had any projects on the go, GitHub account, Stack Overflow profile and a developer ID for the Android store as he has an Android phone. No, no, no and no. I told him nobody has to give you permission to be a developer these days. If you want to be a dev, just go and do it. Build up a portfolio of little apps and projects, or contribute to an existing open source project. Go to a job interview at a dev shop with that to show off and they'll snap you up.
Simon Hibbs
What simonh said.
I paid for Turbo Pascal back in '93 I think. Have legally done everything I want to do with free software. Everything that runs the actual internet, not the MS mangled version of it, is free and open source. Things that sit on the internet like this forum and whatnot are usually free and open source or can be replaced with stuff that is.
And yes, I do have a project or two on GitHub. :coffeesip:
I paid for Turbo Pascal back in '93 I think. Have legally done everything I want to do with free software. Everything that runs the actual internet, not the MS mangled version of it, is free and open source. Things that sit on the internet like this forum and whatnot are usually free and open source or can be replaced with stuff that is.
And yes, I do have a project or two on GitHub. :coffeesip:
ShawnDriscoll
SOC-14 1K
It's just assumed these days that a programmer uses GitHub. One of the best ways to share source code.
I've got to throw some of my stuff up on Github now that I work for an open source employer and don't have to worry about some bean counter suddenly deciding my hobby code belongs to my employer...
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