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Programming...programmer by trade
I come from a family of geeks, where each kid taught the next oldest how to program. I was the youngest, which meant I probably learnt to program at an earlier age than the others. I started off with BASIC, then when I got my first Mac, I started playing with HyperCard.| BASIC | I'm not sure when I started programming in BASIC. I'm pretty sure it was before we moved to Auckland, so I was eight or younger. The first computer which was actually partly mine (shared with one of my brothers) was an Amstrad CPC 464. I wrote a couple of text adventure games, a Wheel of Fortune game (complete with a large-breasted Lana Coc-kroft walking across and turning the letters, and a spinning wheel which my brother helped me with) and Warm Fuzzies, which I later made a Cocoa version of. | | BASIC | I'm not sure when I started programming in BASIC. I'm pretty sure it was before we moved to Auckland, so I was eight or younger. The first computer which was actually partly mine (shared with one of my brothers) was an Amstrad CPC 464. I wrote a couple of text adventure games, a Wheel of Fortune game (complete with a large-breasted Lana Coc-kroft walking across and turning the letters, and a spinning wheel which my brother helped me with) and Warm Fuzzies, which I later made a Cocoa version of. | | HyperCard | When I was 14 I got my first Mac. Not long afterwards, I discovered HyperCard Player, and fiddled about wirth it a bit. I copied the full version of HyperCard from the school computers, thinking it was simply a newer version of what I had, but in fact it allows programming HyperCard stacks. I did a lot of HyperCard stuff, ending up with pretty sophisticated metaprogramming type stuff which made me love scripting languages. I wrote some shareware. In the end I realised that HyperCard was in fact commercial software, so, having made more than the purchase price in shareware payments, I bought it... even though my CD-ROM drive was broken at the time so the CD was useless to me. More... | | HyperCard | When I was 14 I got my first Mac. Not long afterwards, I discovered HyperCard Player, and fiddled about wirth it a bit. I copied the full version of HyperCard from the school computers, thinking it was simply a newer version of what I had, but in fact it allows programming HyperCard stacks. I did a lot of HyperCard stuff, ending up with pretty sophisticated metaprogramming type stuff which made me love scripting languages. I wrote some shareware. In the end I realised that HyperCard was in fact commercial software, so, having made more than the purchase price in shareware payments, I bought it... even though my CD-ROM drive was broken at the time so the CD was useless to me. More... | | AppleScript | Since Mac OS 9, every so often I've written an AppleScript to automate some task or other. I thought it would be an easy language to learn, given my experience with HyperCard and AppleScript's similarity to HyperCard. But it's just different enough that I suspect my HyperCard experience is a hinderance. That combined with the fact that there's usually a long time between each time I write an AppleScript means that it usually takes me quite a while to figure out or remember how to do something. The commands specific to applications are easy enough to use, I can look them up in the dictionaries. It's just the general AppleScript stuff that gets me, the things which ought to be really easy, which are so easy that they're not really documented. More... | | AppleScript | Since Mac OS 9, every so often I've written an AppleScript to automate some task or other. I thought it would be an easy language to learn, given my experience with HyperCard and AppleScript's similarity to HyperCard. But it's just different enough that I suspect my HyperCard experience is a hinderance. That combined with the fact that there's usually a long time between each time I write an AppleScript means that it usually takes me quite a while to figure out or remember how to do something. The commands specific to applications are easy enough to use, I can look them up in the dictionaries. It's just the general AppleScript stuff that gets me, the things which ought to be really easy, which are so easy that they're not really documented. More... | | C | Eventually I thought I ought to learn a 'real' language, what with HyperCard being perceived as rather toy-ish. I taught myself C (and later relearnt it at a blisteringly painful pace at university) and mucked around with it a bit. I didn't really find it that interesting, since I could only do console-IO and some tweaks to a Mac GUI example. Then I discovered something useful that can be done with console-IO... websites! Yep, I wrote CGIs. The first version of the Apronyms site was written in C. It was pretty painful in some ways, C really wasn't made for web programming. But it was something useful, something interesting, something pretty! More... | | C | Eventually I thought I ought to learn a 'real' language, what with HyperCard being perceived as rather toy-ish. I taught myself C (and later relearnt it at a blisteringly painful pace at university) and mucked around with it a bit. I didn't really find it that interesting, since I could only do console-IO and some tweaks to a Mac GUI example. Then I discovered something useful that can be done with console-IO... websites! Yep, I wrote CGIs. The first version of the Apronyms site was written in C. It was pretty painful in some ways, C really wasn't made for web programming. But it was something useful, something interesting, something pretty! More... | | C++ | I learnt C++ soon after learning C. At first I thought it was pretty cool, because of the syntactic sugar, such as iostreams which seemed more natural than printf because they reminded me of printing things in BASIC. Later I realised that the object oritentation support is horrible and each 'feature' seems to be just a hackish way of getting around a limitation due to the classes being essentially C structs. More... | | C++ | I learnt C++ soon after learning C. At first I thought it was pretty cool, because of the syntactic sugar, such as iostreams which seemed more natural than printf because they reminded me of printing things in BASIC. Later I realised that the object oritentation support is horrible and each 'feature' seems to be just a hackish way of getting around a limitation due to the classes being essentially C structs. More... | | Objective-C/Cocoa | For my 21st birthday in May 2001, my brother gave me Mac OS X. I think that's the nicest thing he's ever done for me. I had exams coming up, so knowing that a shiny new operating system would be very distracting, I tried to resist installing it until they were over. I didn't succeed. The night before my C++ exam I was learning Objective-C. More... | | Objective-C/Cocoa | For my 21st birthday in May 2001, my brother gave me Mac OS X. I think that's the nicest thing he's ever done for me. I had exams coming up, so knowing that a shiny new operating system would be very distracting, I tried to resist installing it until they were over. I didn't succeed. The night before my C++ exam I was learning Objective-C. More... | | FORTRAN | In the beginning, there was FORTRAN. More... | | FORTRAN | In the beginning, there was FORTRAN. More... | | PHP | After all that web programming in C, I was happy to find a language which was actually made for it. I quite like PHP, it's quick and easy to write and much better for web development than C is. I recoded the Apronyms site in it, and of course, I used it to make this website. I like scripting languages in general. I have to admit that some of what I like about PHP, I like because it reminds me of HyperCard. More... | | PHP | After all that web programming in C, I was happy to find a language which was actually made for it. I quite like PHP, it's quick and easy to write and much better for web development than C is. I recoded the Apronyms site in it, and of course, I used it to make this website. I like scripting languages in general. I have to admit that some of what I like about PHP, I like because it reminds me of HyperCard. More... | | Other Languages | I've used various other languages too. At work I use a lot of SQL (yeah, I know it's just a query language) and PL/SQL, and also CTRL, the scripting language used in PVSS. I have also used VBScript and Java. There are probably some others I've forgotten to mention. Rob likes Ruby. I should listen to Rob. | | Other Languages | I've used various other languages too. At work I use a lot of SQL (yeah, I know it's just a query language) and PL/SQL, and also CTRL, the scripting language used in PVSS. I have also used VBScript and Java. There are probably some others I've forgotten to mention. Rob likes Ruby. I should listen to Rob. |
This page has been accessed  times since 2024-12-22 19:03:50 Last updated: 2007-01-07 09:46:53
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