Although I've been in these forums for 3 years, my "desire" for programming started more or less 4 years from now. I remember looking with wonder/curiosity at a snippet of code called "Glossomatheia"( Γλωσσομάθεια ) which was just a translated, simplified version of Pascal for high-school education here in Greece( Hellas ). At that time I was attending a computers class and I suddenly, the reason is unclear to me yet, opened the interpreter program for that language and asked the teacher: "How can I write a program with this?!". She demonstrated by typing a tiny program, which I unfortunately don't remember, and when she hit the "Run" button, it actually printed something!! I was intrigued because I couldn't perceive how a few lines of text could actually do something meaningful!!! ( Let me say that THAT class had nothing to do with programming )
Needless to say, after that day I dived into the concept of making programs a.k.a programming. Firstly, I studied the book that accompanied the specific language they were teaching at school. Concurrently I has searching around the web( mind you, I didn't have internet at that time, therefore I had to regularly visit net-cafes ), trying to find information. I firstly stabled upon an interpreter called "Just BASIC", which interpreted a simplified dialect of BASIC. Do you remember the feeling that you had when you looked for the first time to an unfamiliar language? There were a lot of example programs downloaded along, but I COULDN'T OPEN THE HELP FILES! Darn you Windows Vista!!! Anyway, no 24/7 available internet, I started trying to understand this code all by myself. After a lot of trial and error, I started achieving something, even if it was just some puny little programs. But the real tackle with programming was when I started learning C++.
My first encounter with C++ was when I clicked on a link for "C++ Game Programming". I still have the pages! I used to get into a site that I liked, download the pages and take them with me to read them at ease when I got home... Anyway, I started reading the tutorials, writing the code, compiling it, altering it etc( Forgot to say, my first IDE was Dev-C++ ). Then I stuck on the Allegro tutorials that continue after the 11th part I think. A little after that is when I found cprogramming. At first, it was an ordinary site, but as I started reading the tutorials, tips and everything, I knew that there was much knowledge in here. Much of my elementary and deep understanding of C and C++ comes from this site! That's when I registered at the forum and, as any newb, started posting questions on many trivial subjects.
After half a year or so, I started reading more about programming in general. Data structures, UML modeling, optimizations, graphics, computer's theory. Mathematics, calculus, algebra, matrix & 2D/3D/4D math, physics, and what I perform right now, hardware ports & interrupts, x86 assembly while building my very own operating system! o_O
While studying all these, I spontaneously returned to cboard in order to ask for opinions or to solve a big problem. I felt obliged to this site, and of course to many of you members who helped me along the way, therefore I started answering( or rather trying to answer ) to other's questions.
Around 2 years before today, I was trying to write many different programs, small and big. What I really feel ashamed of is that I completed only 3 or 4 of around 50 different projects that I have started. Sometimes I didn't have the necessary knowledge or experience, other times ( in the case of graphics for example ) I didn't have the resources, while sometimes I got bored of a project or had made a fatal design error and had to build everything from scratch again!...
Right now I'm at the 2nd year ( of 4 years ) of my college, which is about "Technology, Computer science and Telecommunications". At first, it was fine. That is, until the programming classes. Please don't think that I exaggerate when I say that from the 6 different programming professors( two for each "lab" and one for each theory ), only one was actually better than me!( C & C++ ) Do you think I was happy for that?! I went there to learn!! Do you know what I felt when I realized that I would learn next to nothing there?! I felt betrayed!!! Believe me that 25% of the time ( mostly at theories ) I argued with the professors, trying to show them the error of their ways! They where making such n00b mistakes, both in programming in general and in C/C++ in particular, that it wasn't funny!! Being with C/C++ for some years, I can't say I have much experience but I undoubtedly have much knowledge on these languages, at the very least. Just as we here correct any answer that we consider wrong, I was doing the same at class. That resulted in many arguments with the professors... Anyway, that's OUR "educational" system, I don't want to trouble you any more with that, I just mentioned it to give you an overview.
Why am I writing all these? you may ask. Well, putting aside that I wanted to get those memories off my chest, I recently noticed that the original "flame", the long & strong love for programming that I had, has started "fading away". All potential projects seem either too easy, too hard or too boring to undertake. I have drop to a "theoretical" state, by only answering questions and still searching for more things to learn, but never practicing anything. I would like to hear( read ) your personal opinion on this. Thanks for reading! :)
