Programming Question - This time it's different

store_bot

There's probably a million threads about beginning language choice, but no one ever asks about beginning programs.



When starting to learn about programming, what did you first program? What did you create in order to gain experience? Or maybe better yet, what was your very first app besides 'hello world?' And why?

Marvin

I think mine was a simple database to get used to data structures (arrays, lists), pointers etc. Data structures are more or less what all programming is about so very important to grasp.

gregmightdothat

Quote:

Originally Posted by store_bot


There's probably a million threads about beginning language choice, but no one ever asks about beginning programs.



When starting to learn about programming, what did you first program? What did you create in order to gain experience? Or maybe better yet, what was your very first app besides 'hello world?' And why?

HyperCard, all the way.



I technically did learn Basic first, but you couldn't do anything really useful with it then.



I made lots and lots of little Myst-style adventure games—though obviously not as long and with clip art rather than 3D graphics.



The next time I programmed was with PERL, then onto ActionScript (Flash), then C++ and finally Objective-C, which is my absolute favorite language so far.

snoopy

Quote:

Originally Posted by store_bot




. . . what was your very first app besides 'hello world?' And why?

After "hello world" was the fibonacci series. Instructor's choice.

mydo

I think I took a "data structures" class and we coded up polynomials. Where were linked lists of monomial. It was actually a lot of fun. It was in C++ so we overloaded the operators for + - * / and coded the math operations. Every time we did an operation we had to sort the monomials by their power and then add the ones with the same power together.



It was

mydo

Look at the "Geometry" section in this Wikipedia. It's the first defaced Wikipedia article I've found. I guess I don't read it a lot.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomial

splinemodel

The first program (not script) I wrote that was not classwork was a program that estimates impedance in a loop antenna of arbitrary polygonal shape and layers. It uses standard IO and takes in an XML file describing the antenna. I would like to get it to accept DWGs, but I'm lazy and never got to doing that. Plus, if I'm going to do it over, I'm going to do it by pure numerical analysis, which will require a total re-write.



Anyway, after four years of being dormant, it looks like I might be doing that rewrite in the near future. I'm working on a low frequency radio project.

thinkingdifferent

My first programming language was Apple's dialect of Basic, Integer Basic.

tb6387

I took a computer engineering course that took a pragmatic approach to programming. We first learned binary, then assembly (for a hypothetical 16-bit architecture) and finally stepped up to C. IMO this was great because it really allowed me to see why the compiler would do the things it did and give you the errors that it does. It really gives you a ground-up view of programming.



That being said, this method works great when it is structured in a class and you are examined on what you know, but may not be the most suitable to teach yourself, although having at least an understanding of assembly language can't hurt anything.



Also, C is not too complicated to learn the basics of and its rather powerful. My first meaningful project was creating an assembler for the aforementioned architecture.