Weekend
Spent Saturday helping a friend prepare for programming exam, not sure how well
it went, but he seemed satisfied enough with the progress. I have forgotten how
I learned it, which things were the most difficult to understand for me, and
how much everything seemed like magic at the beginning. My first experience
with programming was Commodore 64 basic, and I never wrote very much at all, I
played around with it, but never enough to really grasp it. I made a few short
programs, mostly menu systems with fancy colors, and a little disk access, but
that was it. At some point, I discovered QBasic, and a nice thing about that was
the built in documentation, it could be searched and there were examples for
everything, so I spent a lot of time messing around with that, and wrote a bit
more code, but nothing substantial, I think the biggest program I wrote was a
tic-tac-toe game, which would draw the board with characters. I remember it was
basically just a bunch of if statements, so it would play every game the same
way. Next up, I somehow got to run an apache server, and wrote some HTML, which
is not programming, but, this was a great time, because I was spending a lot of
time on IRC, and there were people willing to help out.. I remember letting a
guy connect to my (windows 95!!) server via VNC to configure apache for vhosts,
and I found a guide showing how to install PHP.. Now, PHP is a hated language,
and I see its flaws clearly, but, flawed as it was, it allowed me to achieve
real results quickly enough that I didn't loose interest or give up. Together
with MySQL (another hated product), I was able to do quite a lot, I built a my
own website, and was lucky that nobody killed it with SQL injection before I
found out that was something, and I secured my SQL code :)
I built a +20kloc image-board software which ran for some years before I shut it
down. Then I started looking at C/SDL/OpenGL, which also allowed me a quick
success.. Getting a window with a triangle on screen was enough to motivate me
to write a bit bigger program. The triangle became a space-invaders inpspired
game with no end, called "simplevaders", and after that, I set out to write an
alternative for DX-Ball for Linux (at the time, LBreakout2 was the best around,
and it didn't suit my dad). I didn't read up enough on how OpenGL worked, so I
took a very practical approach to it, and just kind of tried out stuff until it
looked right enough on the screen (very clear if you check the source). But the
game is still a pretty good DX-Ball game for Linux I think, and my dad still
plays. Then I started on Wizznic! and I often think about finishing it.. I feel
that it lacks content.. But content is boring and difficult! Anyway, I got a bit
sidetracked, what I wanted to say, is, that I think a simple language, like C,
or PHP is a lot better to start out with. My friend has to start out with C++,
but except for cout, strings and the injector/extractor operators, everything is
plain old C. My friend gave me the Neon Genesis Evangelion 1,2,3 Manga book, I
am very grateful for that! I am a huge fan of the Anime, and have seen all that
there is to see, even read the fan-mangas, but I am proud to own the official
manga as well, and even though I know the story well, I will read the book and
appreciate the art. There's nothing more to say today, except I visited another
friend and watched some spiderman movie which was very well made, but lacking
in everything but visuals.
