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Pancake wrote:

But I haven't actually touched C/C++ in 10 years or so. Mostly Java now. sscanf() seems like cruel and unusual punishment when learning to program!

LOL... yeah, guess I gotta give you that. Only thing it really has going for it is that it uses the same format specifiers as printf().

JBI, my college courses were in Pascal for the most part, with a smattering of that new-fangled "C". Translating back and forth was the worst thing ever because the syntax was just similar enough...

Probably one of the major reasons that I never became a programmer was an accident of the time-frame I was in school. I understand that in later years Pascal was completely depreciated.

Vhalidictes wrote:

JBI, my college courses were in Pascal for the most part, with a smattering of that new-fangled "C". Translating back and forth was the worst thing ever because the syntax was just similar enough...

They taught no C in undergrad courses while I was in school. I think some of the graduate level courses might have just been starting to use it; there were apparently a few UNIX systems around, but undergrads weren't allowed to touch them. My initial exposure to C was on the job, less than a year after I graduated. Didn't do much Pascal after that, so once I made the transition and started thinking in C it was all good.

Vhalidictes wrote:

Probably one of the major reasons that I never became a programmer was an accident of the time-frame I was in school. I understand that in later years Pascal was completely depreciated.

Heh. My high school CS course and a couple of the undergrad courses I took in college still used punch cards. The college I went to phased them out shortly thereafter (while I was still there). If that didn't scare me away...

just brew it! wrote:

Heh. My high school CS course and a couple of the undergrad courses I took in college still used punch cards. The college I went to phased them out shortly thereafter (while I was still there). If that didn't scare me away...

"Programming" BASIC on punch cards on some CP/M thing at high school! Now that brings back memories... Luckily I first learnt programming at a university summer camp while still in primary school on video terminals connected to a PDP-11/34 so knew there was something better.

Now, the PDP-11 was a mighty fine architecture. Perhaps the most elegant of the 16-bit era. An elegant processor from a more civilised age. Not as random and clumsy as an x86. I never did learn its finer points until at university when salvaging an old Alpha Micro and learning it's assembly language. Talking of classic 8-bit microprocessors. Surely the Western Digital MCP-1600 (which powered the Alpha Micro) deserves an honourable mention as one of the best 8-bit micros as it was used to emulate the PDP-11? Yeah, they used to make great CPUs.

just brew it! wrote:

Heh. My high school CS course and a couple of the undergrad courses I took in college still used punch cards. The college I went to phased them out shortly thereafter (while I was still there). If that didn't scare me away...

HS for me was on a PDP-8/e and I handed in my assignments on punch tape generated on an ancient Teletype Model 33 ASR.

Pancake wrote:

Now, the PDP-11 was a mighty fine architecture. Perhaps the most elegant of the 16-bit era. An elegant processor from a more civilised age. Not as random and clumsy as an x86. I never did learn its finer points until at university when salvaging an old Alpha Micro and learning it's assembly language. Talking of classic 8-bit microprocessors. Surely the Western Digital MCP-1600 (which powered the Alpha Micro) deserves an honourable mention as one of the best 8-bit micros as it was used to emulate the PDP-11? Yeah, they used to make great CPUs.

Whoo-hoo, another Alpha Micro fan! I know I've mentioned them (and the fact that in a past life WD used to design CPUs) in one of the other threads here pretty recently. Might have been in whm's 8-bit thread.

Something else I just remembered... when I was in high school, they UPGRADED their keypunches. The old ones were the classic IBM ones, that punched each column individually as you pressed the keys. The new ones had (gasp!) an 80 character internal buffer, so you could backspace and correct mistakes before hitting the button that caused the whole card to be punched. Except... you could only do that if you noticed and went "oops, I just hit the wrong key", since there was no alphanumeric display; just a 2-digit numeric LED column indicator. The pinnacle of keypunch evolution, circa 1977!

Pancake wrote:

But I haven't actually touched C/C++ in 10 years or so. Mostly Java now. sscanf() seems like cruel and unusual punishment when learning to program!

All C here, as I work in BIOS land (UEFI and coreboot mainly). So I'm using C all the time (my previous job was using C++, though nothing BIOS related). My use of assembly has gone down a lot (modern BIOSs, like OSs use only just enough assembly as necessary these days).

My under grad (mid 2000s) was actually VB6, C and Ada funnily enough, though I've forgotten the other two. I cut my teeth on Delphi for Win32 (and also tinkered with Turbo Pascal 7 for DOS). I Still like the Borland dialect of Pascal.

I have wanted to tinker around with old 8-bit'ters though.

Personally I think the cruel and unusual punishment is having to jump trough hoops with Java/.NET run-times and how sluggish those programs feel though, but I am a native code purest to be honest (I try to avoid anything written in Java/.NET where I can).

Speaking of High School computer classes, besides BASIC I also I took something called RPG or such. You wrote programs by take cards and filling in circles by pencil. I rather liked doing it but that was the only time and place where I founded it in use.

I really wished they had a C programming class back then as maybe that would have pushed me into becoming a developer.

srg86 wrote:

Pancake wrote:

But I haven't actually touched C/C++ in 10 years or so. Mostly Java now. sscanf() seems like cruel and unusual punishment when learning to program!

All C here, as I work in BIOS land (UEFI and coreboot mainly). So I'm using C all the time (my previous job was using C++, though nothing BIOS related). My use of assembly has gone down a lot (modern BIOSs, like OSs use only just enough assembly as necessary these days).

My under grad (mid 2000s) was actually VB6, C and Ada funnily enough, though I've forgotten the other two. I cut my teeth on Delphi for Win32 (and also tinkered with Turbo Pascal 7 for DOS). I Still like the Borland dialect of Pascal.

I have wanted to tinker around with old 8-bit'ters though.

Personally I think the cruel and unusual punishment is having to jump trough hoops with Java/.NET run-times and how sluggish those programs feel though, but I am a native code purest to be honest (I try to avoid anything written in Java/.NET where I can).

Ada... Is that the computer language the US military tried to use to replace all the other programming languages they were using?

whm1974 wrote:

Ada... Is that the computer language the US military tried to use to replace all the other programming languages they were using?

Yep. Just ask JBI.

Captain Ned wrote:

whm1974 wrote:

Ada... Is that the computer language the US military tried to use to replace all the other programming languages they were using?

Yep. Just ask JBI.

Are they still trying? I have long been under the impression that Ada had pretty much crashed and burned despite all of the effort and money that was put into development, and now nobody uses it. I very surprised to discover that GCC can compile Ada code.

Well speaking of Ada, I just did a brief web search and boy oh boy I should really quit "Making an Ass out of You and Me" about stuff. The more I learn the more I hard and fast find out that I don't know that much indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)
Not only it Ada still being widely used, there is an uptake in interest in this language as well. I maybe I should learn Ada after learning C/C++?

"Widely used" is relative. It's still very seldom used relative to C/C++, Java, Python, C#, etc.

According to the IEEE, based on a weighted average of multiple industries and metrics, as of 2016 Ada was the 40th most widely used programming language (just ahead of COBOL): https://spectrum.ieee.org/static/intera ... uages-2016

If you're curious to see what a programming language designed by the US DoD looks like, then have fun. But as a career move there are a lot of better ones.

Ada had the misfortune of being introduced just as C was starting to gain a lot of momentum. Lack of decent compilers early on was also a problem.

just brew it! wrote:

"Widely used" is relative. It's still very seldom used relative to C/C++, Java, Python, C#, etc.

According to the IEEE, based on a weighted average of multiple industries and metrics, as of 2016 Ada was the 40th most widely used programming language (just ahead of COBOL): https://spectrum.ieee.org/static/intera ... uages-2016

If you're curious to see what a programming language designed by the US DoD looks like, then have fun. But as a career move there are a lot of better ones.

Ada had the misfortune of being introduced just as C was starting to gain a lot of momentum. Lack of decent compilers early on was also a problem.

At the moment I'm trying to set long term goals to keep the ball rolling and keep at least doing something constructive with my time as I'm struggling with the issues of of having Major Depression.

And guys, please if I decide to give up please ride my ass to get up and get back on horse. I may hate you guys and even highly cuss you out but giving giving a swift kick in the ass every now and then to keep me going, I will be very thankful for.

Thank you for all the help and encouragement you guys are providing me. I just wish I had people around me who did nothing but this when I was child.

Do we need to give you homework assignments? (I am being semi-serious here.)

just brew it! wrote:

Do we need to give you homework assignments? (I am being semi-serious here.)

That will probably help. Just asking me simple questions every now and then will be helpful.

That's what I meant by having a practical application way back when. A homework assignment will give you a task - a goal. Learning something with goals in mind helps you learn.