Nod. It's like looking at the pilot seat of a Cessna and thinking you can command the next Apollo mission to get rid of that "annoying beeping sound in the background."

You should know by now that I believe in possibilities. There were those here that did not believe JP would release a new version that they would like.

In my own small way I've contributed to a major change in an international company's training methods. My name is in the credits of their training CD and DVD, the person I recruited to replace me when my health took precedence went on to teach these methods to directors in India. The company is Business Network International. You'll see pictures of me and the founder Dr. Ivan Misner on my facebook page.

I think Kav said something about Irish women being stubborn... hehe..

So, who's onboard my next project?

I wish you well in the programming aspect. I am not a programmer, but I've muddled through pascal, db2, db3, clipper, and the various flavors of Access. C has eluded me for the most part. I disliked it when I ran a WWIV BBS and we modded it extensively, and I still dislike it. I currently have Visual C++ 2010 Express loaded and need to get some books on it - the online help sucks. A dual-monitor system would be nice for learning I think.

I see programming as more complicated than ever with different platforms and languages to consider. I think the "one-trick pony" of programming (a single language) is pretty much dead for someone who might make a living at it. I may be completely wrong on that though.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

The project management aspect is one of the hardest things to learn. They don't teach it in school. Or at least not in undergrad comp sci programs. Maybe they have a "management" program for that, where they don't teach anything about writing code.

My first experience as a professional programmer had me thrust into the role of project lead. The small company I worked for had each programmer working on a different project for a different client. I learned hard lessons like, "make the customer describe in detail how their current software works, and how they want the new software to be different." And, "make them show you the data you'll be working with before you make any promises about what can be done with it." The contract was signed before I was hired, so these were by really boss's mistakes. But I paid the price in pulling my hair out and the shame of quitting after realizing the project was doomed. (The client tried to hire me directly after suing my former employer. But by then, I'd learned that two of their own in-house programmers had walked away from the project before they tried to contract it out. I told them to piss off.)

I agree with the advice you've gotten so far. Think of some small program that would serve some need of your own, and write it in the language of your choice. In addition to learning a programming language, learn how to use tools like an IDE and a version control system like SVN. If your project might be useful to others, slap an Open Source license on it and put it up on SourceForge. Or find a project you'd like to fiddle with, check it out into your IDE, and start hacking. If you make some good changes, submit the diffs. If they're good, the maintainer might give you commit access.

I prefer the Eclipse IDE, because it has zillions of plugins for different languages and tools.

OK, so what I'm hearing is today there's a huge, if not insurmountable learning curve to becoming a skilled programmer.

Just wanting to make something do X,Y,Z does not mean you must do it with any one language, but may have to use multiple languages to perform the task or a single languages can get the job done, and you just chose the language you're most skilled in?

BTW thanks for the links Sing, I did download all of netbeans java, and Visual Basic. If we have a rainy weekend I may have time to look at these. But the demo on netbeans - the guy may as well have been speaking Greek. Even though the 2 year program at my local college may not teach programming, I'm hoping to at least gain a better understanding of basic concepts and understand what you're talking about when you say IDE and JDK... too many acronyms! LOL

Sometimes it's better to use the language you know rather than one that's "better" but which you're less skilled in. In the end, only two things matter: correct output, and development time. (And maaaaybe runtime performance, but that's usually a distant concern.)

Eclipse can handle many languages, as well as integration with version control. Netbeans is for Java only. But Netbeans probably has the best free visual GUI designer for Java.

Northeastern University has a master's in project management.
You can specialize in a few different sub-fields too. But yes,
it's not at all related to programming. A good PM with good
programming skills is very rare.



Programmers are born, not trained. It takes a special kind of
personality, perhaps a defective one (hehe), to enjoy programming
enough to persue it despite the challenges. It isn't insurmountable,
but it puts the learning curve in TW to shame. You can train a
person to speak the language, but being good at it means enjoying
the nitpicky tech details.

If you don't find algorithms facsinating, if you don't love to debate
the difference between real random and psuedorandom numbers,
if you don't relish the idea of studying file lock times and data
structures, avoid programming. It takes someone that enjoys all
of that, which is why there's a whole lot more men than women in
the field. Most women are not that single minded.

IDE and JDK, google the terms.

Programs are built like a house. You wire the house in a different
"language" than you use to build the foundation. Core code is often
written in C or C++. Some things are still optimized in assembler.

But as a programmer, you can choose to use those blocks of code to
write new code in another language. If you're working in java you
might be using libraries written in C, for instance. So what language
you work on depends on what level of the code you're working in,
it also depends on what your employer likes. Some places are pure
Microsoft shops. Some places are pure java. Mostly that's because
the apps they support are already written in a language, and
rewriting it would be hugely expensive.

I got into this field very early. I was writing programs in BASIC
and Pascal when I was 10. I got into Pascal pretty heavily as a
young teenager, and then into C++ (Turbo C, then later VC). I
got tired of coding for coding's sake tho, and never found it
fun enough to do professionally. That's why I started playing TW,
it gave me an excuse to write code for a purpose I enjoyed.

Did you forget what it is I do? I’m a bookkeeper who drives her clients’ nutz because I do reconcile to the last penny! And I never said I could not learn to play with TWX, and possibly even try to write code, I said the learning curve was too high for the average Joe. I’ve only dipped my toes into using a few TWX scripts because I think the game is getting closer to where some of us would like to see it. Even then I’m only using buy, mega, neg, surround and mow. My mission has always been to help increase the player base by making the game more average player friendly.

I told SG I would learn his style of playing once I believed the game did have settings to make it more human friendly. I did keep that promise in the HHT 2010 Replay game.



I am NOT most women. Before I knew what an algorithm was I graphed one on a spreadsheet to track the cost of figs, back when they were associated with the colo life/death cycles.



So what is it that you do for a living?

While I don’t have a magic crystal ball, it never entered my mind that I would be coding for anyone but myself. I can see how getting in on some open source projects will be good experience and practice, but my intention is to write my own project or be my own project leader and hire others to code with/for me.

Money is a different thing all together. You have to enjoy algorithms. Look up the difference between a binary sort and a heap sort.



Data analysis is a good start. But a formula is not an algorithm.



These days? That's hard to define. Part-time mathematician and futures trader, part time sooth sayer.



Then you absolutely need to work in open source. Finding something profitable enough to hire out for is not an easy task. Mostly, these days, it's the whole "software as a service" thing.

And this brings us back around to what inspired me to this in the first place... software is a becoming less and less reliable. We're staying after hours today because I got a call from a client, his computer crashed, and now he cannot open QuickBooks. Luckily my son hadn't left for the day yet, he's been on the phone with my client for over an hour now, doing remote access support to fix things. Seems it may be a virus, but they love to call me first, cuz I charge less per hour! LOL

I did goggle binary sort and a heap sort while I'm waiting. I prefer heap sorting.

Actually, professional programmers don't need to get bogged down in this sort of thing. If you do, you're probably wasting someone's money.

I'm not saying that you'll spend time writing them on the job, as they're already written. But if you don't have an interest in how they work, and a basic understanding of time-complexity trade-offs, you're not going to be taken very seriously.

Thank you Mongoose!

OK so IDE - Integrated Developement Environment - This is a GUI (Graphic User Interface) that you use to write programs with. Am I correct?

I'm not wasting anyone's money, just investing my own time, so yes, I do like to understand the basics first before moving on. I'm guessing you two are in your mid 30's? Just to give you a little of my perspective and experience with computers:

Graduated High School 1977 - We did not have PC's, we did not have pocket calculators until my senior year and then they were basic + - * / No percentages, no square roots. I learned and fell in love with bookkeeping using an adding machine! I wonder if anyone here remembers seeing one of those? Talk about learning the basics! I wish everyone took the time to really understand their professions from the ground up.

Fresh out of High School I got a job working with this new thing called a computer - I now know this was a terminal relaying data entry to a main frame. I was let go after 4 hours of work. I was mortified, never even asked why they let me go. - I did not touch another computer for 15 years!

So, 20 some years ago I decided I really wanted to get back into bookkeeping and learn how to use a PC. I went to college before I bought my first PC so I would be an informed shopper. My first was a 486, 8mg Ram, 30MB HD 2400 baud modem. This is the machine I first played TW on. I still have the motherboard, it's so cute!

Probably about 10 - 15 years ago I took a free online course from MSU on writting very simple spreadsheets that had some if/than statements. This was before QuickBooks had a worksheet for calculating State Unemployment taxes, and I had to solve the taxable and excess wages manually. Once I had my little spreadsheet done, I loaded it onto a 3.5" floppy and used it to complete quarterly payroll tax forms.

Sing programing at 10 years old - that's amazing! Kids take natually to technology. When I started my business, my son was 10. He's been custom building all of my machines since he was 16. He started his own IT company this spring after working and mentoring under a great teacher. He's my hardware guy, and he knows a lot about software but has never been interested in coding.

The point is, I do enjoy learning the basics before moving forward, I need to know how things work. And I do appreaciate Mongoose's comment that we needn't waste time on coding basic stuff since that's already been done.

Eclipse is a GUI in the sense that it has buttons and menus and stuff, but it doesn't have a very good visual designer for GUIs. If you want to draw a box, drag some buttons into it, and call it your program, use Netbeans.

At its heart, Eclipse is still a text editor. It does a ton of other things, like highlighting your code, pointing out possible mistakes like assignments that do nothing or assignments where you probably meant to test for equality ("=" vs. "=="), completing what you type, doing tedious stuff like implementing interface methods or creating getters and setters for private fields. I think it makes life easier without taking away too many learning opportunities.