TOTALLY NEW
- Thread starter Unka
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Terminal Velocity
Well-Known Member
Welcome to the forum, this is not a programming forum, it is Linux specific, for programing I suggest Stack Overflow and Code Project, they have worked for me in the past
Condobloke
Well-Known Member
G'day Unka, Welcome to Linux.org
We have a number of members here who excel in the topic you wish to learn about.
They are located all over the world in diferent timezones
Be patient.
They may not give you direct help, but are quite likely to send you off in the right direction
We have a number of members here who excel in the topic you wish to learn about.
They are located all over the world in diferent timezones
Be patient.
They may not give you direct help, but are quite likely to send you off in the right direction
Hillbilly H
Well-Known Member
...Welcome...
Brickwizard
Well-Known Member
Welcome to the forums
wendy-lebaron
Active Member
Welcome to the forums.
Ask me about BASIC and Lua, maybe about Python or "bash" scripting or using "gawk" or "sed" or something else. I'm a hobbyist that never got into a serious project. :/
You could ask me a bit about C. Not C++, I hate object-oriented programming and many concepts will differ between "parent" and "child". I programmed in C for a couple of years in the 1990's but disliked it. But it was the only way to understand more or less what are pointers, what they do, why is a "main" function required in a program and more.
If there's something about programming you would like to know and are curious, you could ask TuxBot in his (its?) own sub-forum. But don't take the advice too seriously. Mostly it's for fun and otherwise "they" could give erroneous advice.
One more thing. Please don't post everything in boldface or capital letters, it's like shouting to some people. These letters could be hard to read, but decorating text in a particular style is considered rude form in an impersonal posting forum.
Ask me about BASIC and Lua, maybe about Python or "bash" scripting or using "gawk" or "sed" or something else. I'm a hobbyist that never got into a serious project. :/
You could ask me a bit about C. Not C++, I hate object-oriented programming and many concepts will differ between "parent" and "child". I programmed in C for a couple of years in the 1990's but disliked it. But it was the only way to understand more or less what are pointers, what they do, why is a "main" function required in a program and more.
If there's something about programming you would like to know and are curious, you could ask TuxBot in his (its?) own sub-forum. But don't take the advice too seriously. Mostly it's for fun and otherwise "they" could give erroneous advice.
One more thing. Please don't post everything in boldface or capital letters, it's like shouting to some people. These letters could be hard to read, but decorating text in a particular style is considered rude form in an impersonal posting forum.
@Unka : Welcome to the forums.
What sort of coding do you want to explore? I can help with learning the fundamentals, especially if you don't care what programming language you start out with. If you do have a specific language in which you want to learn to code, then I can help if you hit one of the languages I'm familiar with.
@wendy-lebaron Which BASIC flavor did you start out with? And what sorts of things did you do in C back in the previous century? (It still seems surreal to put it that way. Back in the nineteen hundreds... )
What sort of coding do you want to explore? I can help with learning the fundamentals, especially if you don't care what programming language you start out with. If you do have a specific language in which you want to learn to code, then I can help if you hit one of the languages I'm familiar with.
@wendy-lebaron Which BASIC flavor did you start out with? And what sorts of things did you do in C back in the previous century? (It still seems surreal to put it that way. Back in the nineteen hundreds... )
wendy-lebaron
Active Member
In junior high school, the Apple ][e. LOL. Then I got a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer 2 without Extended BASIC which had only 16KB. Did many things with that but it was slow. Never had a Commodore C64 nor Timex Sinclair.
A bit later for computer science course in high school I got a taste of Borland Turbo Pascal v3. Awesomesauce software although with mind-ruining keystroke shortcuts LOL. Sometime later, when I got a PC, I purchased M$ QuickBASIC v4.5 and Borland Turbo Pascal v6, which had much better full-screen editors. Out of my heavy use of QuickBASIC I came to adopt QB64 at least 10 years later and that's what I have been using since. I have also done a lot with Lua such as a simple WAV file processor. I have programmed many times for my music and various file creation for the music programs I have used. For example, random preset generators for synthesizers.
This kind of stuff I was trying to do with C. I started with PowerC by Mix Software from Richardson, Texas (this company still exists BTW). I also had Borland Turbo C++ but seldom used it. Also had M$ QuickC v2.5 but it was too weird especially the console functions. Both the previous ones named were unlike QuickBASIC, they were too big for the memory that MS-DOS was willing to allocate for them. For example, there was not enough RAM to hold the QuickC editor, compiler/linker and user's program all at the same time, within 640KB. This might be hard to believe today but this was true. An user edited the program in the editor. Then when he/she goes to compile it, the editor overlay had to be swapped out so the program was compiled. Then when compilation was finished, the editor had to be restored in case the user desired to keep changing the program. Alternatively the user could choose to run the program he/she had just created, but for that, the editor had to be swapped out of memory again. M$ tried to resolve it with incremental compilation but it wasn't much faster on my computer. As I've said, it was weird.
Turbo C++ was a bit better cooperating. The problem is I had to sacrifice a 384KB ramdisk to hold the editor's data while swapping to MS-DOS shell or running a program that was created. Discovered that had a different vibe to Turbo Vision, the text-mode GUI-creation library, that that for Turbo Pascal which made me hate object-oriented programming in C++.
Going with C was frustrating because it was quite different from programming in BASIC. In particular, pointers, and I was too comfortable using string functions instead of "strcpy()" and stuff like that. I built a simple text-mode window manager for MS-DOS but remained dissatisfied, it still had a lot of bugs. I have never cared that QB64 for Windows came with a subset of MinGW that I could have used the C++ compiler out of it and ignored BASIC.
A few times however I have done some simple console programs in C. Such as a game in which the user is told to write down the moves into a maze before he/she is shown the maze. This is because I haven't figured out, especially on Linux how to poll interactively for keystrokes. How to do an "ncurses" application which is probably simple to do on Python these days. :/
I was what is known as a military personnel system manager in the United States Air Force in the late 1970's thru the mid 1980's. We used a unique computer language that was strictly for the Air Force. It was a combination of the program languages used at that time. In my office were clunky crts and a IBM series 1 main frame computer. I have messed with using computers since the early 1970's and am still doing so. I will more than gladly pass along what I know but do not claim to be very good at the stuff used today. For years I used Microsoft Windows, but when I was introduced to Linux and had the guts to install and use it I have never gone back. I currently have Linux Mint 20.2 on my Dell Optiplex 3020 computer with 8GB of RAM.
Always,
Wildman
Always,
Wildman
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My first BASIC was TRS-80 BASIC, though I've never used TRS-80. This was running on some multi terminal machine in one of the engineering/science labs at my college back in the days when "Intro to Computers" was a programming class. Later I did dome BASIC programming on Timex/Sinclair 1000, Atari 400, C64 and DOS boxes. Only one of my BASIC programs ever actually served a useful purpose and that purpose would have been better served by a simple spreadsheet it I'd known about such things at the time.
In those days, I made a hobby of learning new programming languages. I bought a used CP/M (Z-80) machine because the seller included Turbo Pascal with it and I not only learned Pascal but also FORTH and Z-80 assembly language.
I'd been trying to learn C on an Amiga and, even with the help of a friend who was a Computer Science grad from CMU, I couldn't seem to grasp it. Turns out my friend was trying to reach me GUI programming - you make a window structure attached to a frame buffer structure and you attach a font structure to that...." (or some such baloney) - "Hello, World!" was just not going to appear on screen! But, unbeknownst to me, I actually learned C. A couple of years later, when I took a C programming course at Community college, using Turbo C++ (but using C, not C++), on DOS, writing console programs, the instructor would explain some facet of C programming and I'd be kind of amazed and baffled because I'd think to myself, "I already know this". The instructor must have thought I was just picking this stuff up -really- fast, in much the same way that the rest of the class -wasn't- and he was so impressed that he eventually offered me a job (which I accepted). It turns out he and two of his partners in a consulting firm were all teaching classes at the community college as part of their recruiting effort. They were all really good instructors - and they were basically conducting year-long interviews at the same time.
I eventually left their company to do some fairly involved C programming for an ISP (for twice the salary) - who promptly went bankrupt when the dot-com bubble burst (the consulting company went under a about the same time, so I'd have been equally screwed if I hadn't left there). I haven't done any non-trivial C programming since then.
@Unka : Sorry to have digressed from the initial thread - I guess this might have been better placed. :/
