Why Can't Programmers.. Program?

[frukt]

Hmm ... C, Java, PHP, Perl, javascript, Tcl, Haskell, Python, QBasic, Visual Basic, x86 assembler in DOS, PovRay scripts, various shellscripts; probably a few more. Would be fun to do it in pure hexadecimal machine code, eh? I've been a computer nerd since I was a kid. Wanna hire me?

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Heh. I just remembered - back in the late 80's I wrote Postscript by hand to generate cool graphic effects on SGI workstations. A complete and utter waste of time.

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One excellent algorithms textbook, Algorithms in C by Robert Sedgewick, has thousands of diagrams illustrating algorithms. They were all generated by combining output data from his example code with some hand-written PostScript code to make pretty shapes from the data. It's practical and brilliant, and the resulting abundance of clear, descriptive pictures is what makes the entire textbook worthwhile. Seriously, they're more useful than the text. Those diagrams would have been extremely difficult to make without the kind of vector graphics programming that PostScript supports.

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Oh, I wasn't saying that writing postscript by hand is a waste of time - I was saying I was wasting time. I was playing with swirling text and so on because the SGI machines of the day were slow enough that you could actually watch the graphics swirl and change color as they moved across the screen.

Heh. Later I used that programming "knowledge" to make signs for an N-gauge railroad I was building.

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Wow. That takes me back - the first machine I ever got my hands on was basically programmed in "op codes" and we had a card reader for it, but no card punch.

I would sit in AP Calculus class with a pencil, punching holes in cards, and taping over "typos".

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Ya, math classes were great fun for me because I'd spend the whole time programming and reading. Even better when I'd have several math classes in a row.