Maybe not these days, but back in 1979 I think that would have been an exceptional case. In fact, the first PC I ever saw was like, back in 1983, and the owner had one simply because she was a chemist and needed it for work-related processing. And it wasn't at least another 10 years before I noticed anyone else having one. Hell, I didn't even own, much less know how to use, a computer until maybe '98 or '99! I was a bit behind, though.Originally Posted by iMalc
Woot, i stand corrected... Commodore BASIC FTW!!!I don't know - it took me about a hour and a half to master BASIC, and I'm pretty sure I didn't miss anything.
Actually I was 9. I have a picture around here somewhere of me with my VIC-20, Ill have to dig it up.You look too young to be 50, abachler. Unless you're saying you started programming when you were, like, 10.
Heh, I actually had to google that. Pretty impressive specs, too:
Why on earth would you need that much RAM, anyway?
Anyway, at 9, that's pretty amazing. I don't think I could have grokked such a thing so young. In fact, if it didn't involve like lizards or GI Joe, you could safely assume that it was out of my league...
Nothing wrong with hobbyists either. I am a hobby programmer for C++ and have come to a huge understanding, especially due to hanging out on these boards.
They are probably the best source of learning C or C++
That is awsome!Nothing wrong with hobbyists either. I am a hobby programmer for C++ and have come to a huge understanding, especially due to hanging out on these boards.
They are probably the best source of learning C or C++
Thank you for the info!
How does it do that?C++ forces you to have structure in your programs, structure that makes sense.
I might be wrong.
Quoted more than 1000 times (I hope).Thank you, anon. You sure know how to recognize different types of trees from quite a long way away.
I was going to ask the same thing. If you wanted to, you could write a program with no classes, and no functions other than the main function. I shudder at the thought of doing such a thing for most of the programs I've written, but I suppose it would be possible.
Maybe "forced structure" was a bad choice of words.
What I mean is sometimes in languages like C# or Java, you rely so heavily on built-in "nice-ities" that you get away from relying on yourself to do basic things. That's all well and good, but sometimes it feels like something is missing. I don't know, I can't explain it.
I can tell you from my experience that learning C++ in high school was one of the best things I've ever done. I started BASIC programming on the Apple II at about 11 years old, and did that for a while, then got my feet wet with procedural programming in QBasic, then a friend gave me an old version of Borland C++ when I was a junior in HS. This was back in the days of DOS 6.22 and windows 3.1(1). C++ didn't even have templates yet at that time. I have now worked with C, C++, C#, Python and PHP, and I can say without a doubt that, had I not learned C++ first, I would not have picked up the other languages as easily.
On a side note, there was mention of RealBasic and LabVIEW, and I have used FreeBASIC from time to time, and find it to be quite useful. It uses nearly identical syntax to QBasic, but adds classes and other OO features, without the typical MS bastardization. There are ports of wxWidgets and GTK+ for it, and since it's basically a front end for GCC, it has good interoperability with code from other gcc compilers.
