Programmer and Other Digital Peoples Thread

[LukeTim]

Assembler is a great language, very powerful and very easy to grasp. Just like chess, there\'s only so many moves you need to know, but it takes a lifetime to master the game.

The trouble most people seem to have with it is that you have to be certain you know what you want, because the computer will execute whatever you tell it to, there\'s very little going on in the sense of sanity checks.

The problem I have with Assembly is that it takes SO bloody long to do anything.

Why write in Assembly myself when I can use C and a good compiler (presumably written by an assembly expert) which can make the resulting assembly and machine code a shit load more efficient than I could ever make it? And it\'d take me a fraction of the time, with the same, if not better, result.

[6677]

The problem I have with Assembly is that it takes SO bloody long to do anything.

Why write in Assembly myself when I can use C and a good compiler (presumably written by an assembly expert) which can make the resulting assembly and machine code a shit load more efficient than I could ever make it? And it\'d take me a fraction of the time, with the same, if not better, result.

How are you going to code in C without someone else writing the assembly code to allow you to write C in the first place. Nowadays C and a good compiler are perfectly valid solutions but you supposedly get more control writing manually (and probably more bugs). I can\'t really talk though seeming as I can\'t write C or any assembly.

[LukeTim]

How are you going to code in C without someone else writing the assembly code to allow you to write C in the first place. Nowadays C and a good compiler are perfectly valid solutions but you supposedly get more control writing manually (and probably more bugs). I can\'t really talk though seeming as I can\'t write C or any assembly.

Well, yeah, of course someone is going to have to deal with Assembly at some point. I\'d just rather that wasn\'t me.

And if I really need control, I can write in C, half compile to Assembly Language, and then change that before completing the compilation to Machine Code.

[Moach]

assembly language isn\'t hard, really.... it\'s actually very straightforward

it\'s just that it gets plain unmanageable, for any program larger than a single function or two.... and it\'s absolutely incompatible between platforms, so any 'port' is actually a full rewrite....

i opt for leaving that stuff for ppl making compilers...

for me, i find it\'s very unliikely that a REAL need for it will arise for the majority of projects i undertake - and even so, you can always just '__asm' it into C++ and skip all the 'boring' part :

so while assembly isn\'t hard - it IS usually best written by machine than by man....

now, this is a 'hard' language (its name might be found offensive)

[6677]

assembly language isn\'t hard, really.... it\'s actually very straightforward

it\'s just that it gets plain unmanageable, for any program larger than a single function or two.... and it\'s absolutely incompatible between platforms, so any 'port' is actually a full rewrite....

i opt for leaving that stuff for ppl making compilers...

for me, i find it\'s very unliikely that a REAL need for it will arise for the majority of projects i undertake - and even so, you can always just '__asm' it into C++ and skip all the 'boring' part :

so while assembly isn\'t hard - it IS usually best written by machine than by man....

now, this is a 'hard' language (its name might be found offensive)

My computing teacher told me about [insert offensive but true name here] once.

I think the name is an understatement, take hello world:

 ++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

WHAT!!!

Anyhow, back to playing around with python and ROT13. Something I\'ve never done before so figured I would try it.

[LukeTim]

assembly language isn\'t hard, really.... it\'s actually very straightforward

it\'s just that it gets plain unmanageable, for any program larger than a single function or two.... and it\'s absolutely incompatible between platforms, so any 'port' is actually a full rewrite....

i opt for leaving that stuff for ppl making compilers...

for me, i find it\'s very unliikely that a REAL need for it will arise for the majority of projects i undertake - and even so, you can always just '__asm' it into C++ and skip all the 'boring' part :

so while assembly isn\'t hard - it IS usually best written by machine than by man....

now, this is a 'hard' language (its name might be found offensive)

I never meant that it was hard. I just meant that it is so long-winded and irritating to use that I absolutely hate it.

[frenchie16]

Well, I\'m a freshman in college, not sure what I\'m going to be studying yet but definitely thinking about computer science. I taught myself some actionscript 2 in middle school (too long ago and I was too young to really remember it, but I\'m going to go with the popular opinion and say it was awful ), did some stuff in Unity back when it was Mac-only (javascript), wrote an IRC bot in Java, took a class on programming in high school using NetLogo (that was WEIRD), and finally, just had my first REAL CS class, in which I learned Racket (a descendent of Scheme, which is in the Lisp family). Wow. Everyone else in the class despised Racket (having taken formal classes in/taught themselves Java, mostly), but I thought it was pretty wonderful. Anyone else have opinions (either way) on Lisp-like languages?

[LukeTim]

Well, I\'m a freshman in college, not sure what I\'m going to be studying yet but definitely thinking about computer science. I taught myself some actionscript 2 in middle school (too long ago and I was too young to really remember it, but I\'m going to go with the popular opinion and say it was awful ), did some stuff in Unity back when it was Mac-only (javascript), wrote an IRC bot in Java, took a class on programming in high school using NetLogo (that was WEIRD), and finally, just had my first REAL CS class, in which I learned Racket (a descendent of Scheme, which is in the Lisp family). Wow. Everyone else in the class despised Racket (having taken formal classes in/taught themselves Java, mostly), but I thought it was pretty wonderful. Anyone else have opinions (either way) on Lisp-like languages?

Sorry?

How can you be at College without knowing what you will be studying?

Also, I don\'t know how it is in other Unis, but the School of Computing Science at my Uni is atrocious. They don\'t teach about hardware at all, teach with Java and it\'s filled with students who have no idea (and for the most part don\'t even want to know) how a computer works... heck, they barely know what a computer is. It\'s all boring high-level crap to me.

If you want to learn more about hardware and low-level programming, Computer Systems/Electronic and Computer Engineering could be better.

Just a tip.

[6677]

Anyone else have opinions (either way) on Lisp-like languages?

Never used it but looking at wikipedia its very heavy on the brackets isn\'t it?

[frenchie16]

Parentheses, but… yes, yes it is.

[Link Hogthrob]

Just stumbled upon this thread...

I\'ve been writing code for a long time. BASIC and Logo as a kid and in high school. Pascal, FORTRAN, COBOL, Scheme, and C++ in college.

Professionally, I did some Perl and Javascript in the mid 90s for websites. Then Powerbuilder in the late 90s. Started with C++ again for commercial windows apps in \'99. Have done some VB and VBScript. Started dabbling in C# in 2002 or 2003, then went full tilt .Net/C# at work in 2007.

I have some DirectX experience and Managed DX, and just a tiny bit of mucking around in XNA.

I am a Senior Software Engineer by title, but more of a Software Engineering Manager, since I am doing more management than code nowadays.

[6677]

Been playing with python this afternoon and after some google searching I found that you can print to the windows command line in different colours. The code I found to demo it was horrifically overcomplicated in the end and I stripped it back to this:

from ctypes import *

windll.Kernel32.GetStdHandle.restype = c_ulong
h = windll.Kernel32.GetStdHandle(c_ulong(0xfffffff5))
for color in range(0,16,1)#change range to change colours shown
  windll.Kernel32.SetConsoleTextAttribute(h, 7)
  print str(color) + ':'
  windll.Kernel32.SetConsoleTextAttribute(h, color)
  print 'hello'
  print ' '
raw_input('press enter to close')

I have no idea what the windll stuff is doing but I did work out how to change the colours at least.

I also found that the range can go upto 256 (technically 0 to 255) as it starts to change the background colours aswell. 256 it then counts as 0 again and so on.

There are 16 foreground colours and 16 background colours.

Assuming we have a function called 'change' to change color we can print 2 colours to the same line like this aswell:

change(23)
print 'one colour',  #the comma seems to get it to print on another line, much simpler than the method we got taught in school for python 3 and I assume it works in python 3 aswell.
change(47)
print 'and now its another colour'

Probably useless to post this but I found it interesting.

[frenchie16]

Sorry?

How can you be at College without knowing what you will be studying?

Also, I don\'t know how it is in other Unis, but the School of Computing Science at my Uni is atrocious. They don\'t teach about hardware at all, teach with Java and it\'s filled with students who have no idea (and for the most part don\'t even want to know) how a computer works... heck, they barely know what a computer is. It\'s all boring high-level crap to me.

If you want to learn more about hardware and low-level programming, Computer Systems/Electronic and Computer Engineering could be better.

Just a tip.

WHERE DID THIS POST COME FROM?

I swear it wasn\'t there last time I looked.

Anyway: you can be undecided at a lot of universities, at least in the U.S., until some time sophomore year or something. I have to declare a major by November, but I can pretty much change it whenever I want-though that may mean I won\'t graduate on time. (I\'m taking intro-level physics and calc, which are applicable to just about every major I might do, so.) I\'m probably going to declare Robotics Engineering or RBE/CS double-major.

We\'ve got a quite good electrical and computer engineering program. I don\'t know how the CS program is, but there do seem to be people who care about learning about CS. Java is used for the class on Object-Oriented Programming, but I think each class uses whatever is best suited to the subject matter/whatever the professor wants, hence the introductory class using Racket.

[LukeTim]

WHERE DID THIS POST COME FROM?

I swear it wasn\'t there last time I looked.

Anyway: you can be undecided at a lot of universities, at least in the U.S., until some time sophomore year or something. I have to declare a major by November, but I can pretty much change it whenever I want-though that may mean I won\'t graduate on time. (I\'m taking intro-level physics and calc, which are applicable to just about every major I might do, so.) I\'m probably going to declare Robotics Engineering or RBE/CS double-major.

We\'ve got a quite good electrical and computer engineering program. I don\'t know how the CS program is, but there do seem to be people who care about learning about CS. Java is used for the class on Object-Oriented Programming, but I think each class uses whatever is best suited to the subject matter/whatever the professor wants, hence the introductory class using Racket.

Robotics Engineering, sweet choice.

CS can be good. A few years ago, the CS course at my University was a lot better. They taught about Computer Hardware and Architecture, and even basic Electronics... which I think is essential for any person to know if they are going to program (and, indeed, study computing as a science) effectively. Unfortunately, the two guys who gave those lectures moved over to my Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering school, and then the CS school went way downhill. At least I get the benefit of their teaching anyway. I would hate to be doing CS at my Uni nowadays. As for Java, I just find it so redundant and irritating. Unfortunately, they make me use it in my CS modules.

It\'s weird that you don\'t really have any idea what your Degree is gonna be though. In the UK we apply for specific degree programmes, so we know straight away what we\'ll be getting into. That\'s not to say you can\'t switch degree programme once you\'re in, though, which is what I did (I was going to do Chemical Engineering). I think it\'s probably better not to know at first, though... and to have some choice, and a taste of what you could do before deciding.