How Many of You Program?

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This site is full of hardware geniuses, but I am totally curious how many of you program. I've been programming for a few years myself and am highly skilled especially in web design. Do you have any programming experience?

I hope this topic fits, I thought it'd be interesting to see how many hardware people know programming.
 

McHenryB

Admirable
I agree that the Motorola 68000 is an excellent choice of microprocessor to learn assembler on. It has a very logical and full set of instructions and a rich set of registers. And, perhaps best of all, it is a 32-bit processor.... :)
 
Cool thread, I'm a web developer by profession. At work we have a mix of .net and php sites. I really like Zurb Foundation for a lightweight HTML framework. We also have Wordpress sites which are good when people use standard practices to create the themes (like creating a darn child theme).

I have some wierd stuff where I am calling an MS SQL stored procedure from php and have a mix of technologies, my job MAKE IT WORK! :)

OVerall I lover being a web dev and wouldnt trade it for the world, I'd love to dive deeper into native mobile development, heck so would the rest of the world.

The more I learn the more I appreciate well developed open source tools. I have a unix box and a windows one depending on what I'm doing but if it were up to me I'd develop 100% in a unix (ubuntu) environment. The elegance of the terminal is hard to replicate. Recently I've been getting more involved with SASS builds and although there is ways to configure it on windows it is just som much easier in unix with the use of something like COMPASS.

Another cool part of the job is all the free development conference that I ge tto attend. This year it was a WordCamp and Bracket.IO.

Have no desire to go back and learn assembly in this OO world but I do appreciate people that came from that background. I'm just here for the high level madness. Everyday I benefit from many people's blood sweat and tears to have the tech that we have today.

Also I'm in strong agreeance with the importance of vanilla JS. Its easier to read and still gets the job done. JQUERY and other populat libraries have their place but can be difficult to read sometimes. That being said a lot of stuff formerly done on server side is now being accomplished much more efficiently with JS.
 

itmoba

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Aug 14, 2015
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If you ask me, jQuery seems to be quickly losing popularity to AngularJS. Albeit somewhat tangential, frankly, I'm amazed by the fact that JavaScript is becoming increasingly favored on the server-side of things via Node.js. I simply don't understand the development of the paradigm war. By this, I mean that Perl was replaced by PHP, only to be ousted by Python, which thereafter was then ousted by Ruby; yet, by that time companies started asking for server-side developers to know Node.js; then, improvement in Zend and Haxe gave PHP an injection. It's total ****ing ape-**** madness!!!
 

randomizer

Champion
Moderator
AngularJS solves a different problem to jQuery, so it's not really replacing it (it's built on jQuery's API anyway). AngularJS is also losing popularity to React + [state management library of the week] in some circles, though it will live on in the slow-moving enterprise world for years. jQuery will likely live on for even longer. WordPress will ensure that.

Node.js is quite different to all of the others on the server-side. Its event-driven, single-threaded nature brings some strong advantages but also some big caveats.
 
The most complex thing I designed for my website is an online battling system. I run a site that is basically a fictional card game. There are about 100 types of cards, and you can compete in duals online. I programmed the online system storing online battled in a MySQL database and using PHP calls to and from the database. Javascript is used on the client with no libraries.

The website has about 200 users :p My future lies in hardware anyway.
 

anikkket

Honorable
Oct 29, 2013
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10,640

Sorry for late reply,
I dont think that it is going out of date. It is still a better choice for web development due to light weight elements used & having good separation of code,design & models from each other so multiple users can work on different parts of the same view
 

ExtremelyGeeky

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Jan 2, 2016
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I taught myself a little by messing around with a website I built, I used weebly and then I just read some stuff and trial and errored my way to being able to fully edit and customize a template but I can't do anything else past that yet, although i'd love to learn...I guess I am slightly intimidated by it all. I tried this free online class for java and it was like ew...didn't make a whole bunch of sense to me but someday i hope to learn. I'd love to be proficient in everything but that may be a pipe dream.
 

Joe Porter

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Aug 12, 2013
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I have started teaching myself python, I am using www.codeacademy.com at the moment but also plan on getting a book of some sort to help and fill in gaps/give me additional info on certain topics. So far I feel I have learned a reasonable amount considering I have only been doing it for a few weeks. It's hands on learning which really suits me.
 

Joe Porter

Honorable
Aug 12, 2013
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Yeah, I have completed 50% of the python course at the moment but as you say i'm yet to see how you could apply this stuff to the real world. I do feel it is a very good place to start though to understand the concepts of the language.
 
Any utility that helps you to code has to be good. Humans don't seem to be able to write anything other than the language they usually write in without huge numbers of typos creeping in. Whilst a typo - and I certainly display enough - can usually be read and understood as such; one in code will mess thiings up completely.

Somewhere harmlessly to practice is a welcome place.
 

randomizer

Champion
Moderator


Sometimes it will mess things up subtly. That's even worse. I once wrote a test for some code that was meant to assert that a function returned the expected result given known input (a typical unit test), but I actually asserted that the expected result equalled the expected result. Naturally the test passed :lol: I discovered this by chance about 18 months later.
 

itmoba

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Aug 14, 2015
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Sorry, analysis tools can only do so much. Perhaps one of the most ubiquitous errors that's often syntactically correct is the "off-by-one" (also known as "one-off") error (i.e., index limits being miscounted). I don't think this problem will ever go away -- the only vaccines against it are (a) taking discrete math, (b) having a brain, (c) not programming whilst under the influence of a substance [you can pry my single malt scotch whisky from my cold dead hands], and/or (d) not programming for days without sleep, trying to meet a deadline.
 

dcb2016

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Apr 1, 2016
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I do some programming--as a hobby. I have never had a job that pays me to do programming.

Most of my coding is in C++. Then JavaScript. Most of the programs I write are numerical programs for use by students. The programs then get posted on a website (I know some HTML too) and I have also recently started posting the C++ source code on GitHub.
 

eblackmo

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Oct 9, 2015
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I have been using C# .net since ~2008. Did a lot of back end stuff, SOA, distributed. Also front end like webforms (yikes) currently doing some MVC in conjunction with dependency injection. To modernise a web application that I am working on. If there is one pattern you want to learn it's DI/IOC. It has a lot of benefits and not just for extensibility but for unit testing and QA also.