Hello World

I have decided to put up a blog regarding various issues related to programming. Basically the lack of a soap box regarding my style issues in programming is the main cause..

So here it goes.
The journey I have taken on coding is a long one, which begins with a little Logo, which got abandoned quickly. A little later, not surprisingly, QBasic took over. After a couple years this led to wandering into the miniature version of VB (VB for apps) included in MS Office.

Another little later I got into coding with VB 6. The next transition I attempted was VC++ 6, but this one failed and actually the environment made me get a headache. This failure had several reasons, among them that the book I had, was not on C++, but on VC++, teaching C++ in a small appendix (which of course doesn't work out very well). This postponed any further venture towards C until about high school.

In fact the book I learned C/C++ from was some random clumsy ebook on the net, which explained some important concepts -- such as the pointer, vary clearly. This was followed by my almost wholesome departure from windowsland, and this was kind of the "golden age" of physics in my coding. Especially after learning of STL around the end of high, mocking Java and all other coding languages was a common idea of mine. Although the "pure C" spirit of some people never really caught me, C++ was "the way". (And I hated Java, probably a biased decision I rightfully made on what I call the "applet nonsense" era)

The next thing that happens is a Java mandatory course at university. So, we learn Java. Through "Thinking in Java", I learn the true values that come along with it -- especially the second time through, after having written projects in Java. Ideas important to OOP that were more likely neglected, or had less emphasis in (my) C++, such as exceptions, inner classes, interfaces, Java's way of enabling "virtual" on everything (aka polymorphism), and although unrelated to Java, it was also my first exposure to serious concurrency.

Up to this point I have also been exposed to some PHP and also know some Perl, and was also using Perl as a "glue" language, making use of the regexps as a powerful tool and replaced shell scripts and also served as a simple "web interface" to some shell scripts.

As to summarize the important issues captured up to here in these experiences, we can breif:
1. Interactive prompt (Logo)
2. Transition to structured programming from macaroni
3. Joy of ease of coding in scripting languages, but unfortunately they weren't serious
4. Object oriented programming
5. Strong typing

Followed was crossing roads with Python, which was a totally different experience.