Programming Challenges

Don't worry, this thread is not asking for programming challenges. Rather, I want to know what your hardest programming challenge was. It could be anything, from a concept you could not get to learning a new language.

Trying to get a windowed NASM application to work. Main problem had to do with the fact that I conceptually didn't understand the call stack, and had all sorts of problems with calling convention, function enter/exit procedures, using locals + api structures, very mind bending.

Working on a MIPS assembly project that just would NOT give the correct output until I realized that a function the professor provided did not preserve all registers when called.

He told us that, as well. Two days after the assignment was due.

Modems. I hate modems.

Printing "Hello World"...

... in thin air.

Sly, I think the OP meant the hardest programming challenge that you have completed. (If you've managed to print "Hello, World" in thin air, then please give me the code; for I'd be very interested in it. :) )

Getting my first SDL programs to work was very difficult. Figuring out a generic algorithm for tetris (this was a long time ago!) was also tough.

For me it would have to be my lasts assignment, I had to code a simulation for a ATM machine. Took me a while to gather all the information from the various banks to discover what the ATM machine does in the sense of where it goes to collect the various data.

After that I had to sit down and think of all the different classes I could incorperate, ie: keypad, deposit, withdraw and so on. Then coding the simualtion took me about two weeks of craft. Not to mention a really annoying linker error that had me bugged for a day which I finally eliminated. Good exercise mijnd, and it made me see what the proffesionals of the programming world really have to do. It aint easy

Yeah, Sly, you're supposed to have done it.