There are 10 kinds of people. Those who don't know anything about theoretical computational models, those who do, and those who know that trinary is the most efficient.


(I'm still waiting to see someone figure out how to build an e-nary computer -- that's technically the most efficient)

And after getting back from a two-week vacation do you still understand it our you have to re-learn everything? :P

Funny that.
I know perl for about 10 years and python for a few months only, and I tend to think of python as cryptic (with all its generators and closures and static methods and class methods and decorators and mutables and immutables etc.), whereas perl is so clear and simple and straightforward.

Well I came in here hoping to learn something.

And I did!

I learned I don't belong in here.

I'll just be leaving now. Carry on.

Never had a problem.
I have a writing methodology that is very geared to my taste, so it is easy for me to read my code, and anything that is not immediately trivial gets a comment (e.g. every variable must have an explanatory comment, no exceptions).

In case of Perl i think it's a reasonable idea :). I remember having to debug some Perl script ages ago written by someone else, knowing zero Perl back then and scratching my head for a week until I figured it out.

I've had issues trying to learn either honestly.

You must remember that I work in firmware, which tends to be the strictest of the strict. We have a 40-page coding convention document and we're not even allowed to use C standard library functions. This discipline trickles into all my programming. Practically everything I write is written from scratch with nothing but an editor (in my case, vim).

Very nice thread :)

While Tom may have name checked me in his OP, I'm really very much an amateur and hobbyist.

I've been teaching myself programming on and off since I was about 12, always with the goal of making games (though I've never quite reached it).

I started off with C++, then Java and Python and now (thanks to my Fundamentals script) doing quite a bit with Javascript. I also know things like PHP, HTML and CSS to an extent (enough to get by when building websites).
I'm not sure I have a favourite or preferred language.. I have a soft spot for C++, but doubt I could actually do much these days as it's been years since I've used it. Probably done the most work recently in Java (and gotten the furthest in projects in Java), but have developed a liking for the scripting languages like Python and Javascript.

Not sure I'd be much help to anyone, most of my work is done by deciding what I want to do and then looking up StackOverflow to see how to do it... but I'm certainly willing to offer a hand to anyone who needs it :)

Having just spent the last few months doing this kind of stuff I might be able to help here... it depends what you mean though. When you say you use software, is that a web based program or a traditional one?
If it's web based then I'm sure some kind of Javascript userscript like Essentials could do the job and I could point you in the right direction of how I got started, but if it's a more traditional program I'm not sure I'd know where to start to access the information...

That's brilliant. I love Halloween at Christmas.

I've been in IT since 1998 and have a MCSE in NT4. Never bothered to update it. I also single handedly checked an entire ERP system, rewrote about 20 thousand lines of code and normalised that most poorly designed database to ensure Y2K compliance in about 3 months. Yes at the nth minute my bosses decided against the planned replacement and chose to keep the existing mess.

I then spent the next 13 years skirting between development and administration. I'm now a full time career for wife and children.

My Specialisation was Foxpro

Well this is a rather nice and interesting thread and nice to hear all your experiences whether you are just a hobbyist or a professional, for me personally i had my first gaming experience in 1975 when i first saw Pong and i was like WOW and just knew that was something i wanted to learn to understand and do for myself. I acquired a Vic 20 in 1980 and started to learn basic and wrote my first game which was published in 1984 called Invaders 64 and it's just snowballed ever since.

In all those years i've programmed in over 20 different languages ranging from Basic, Assembler, Pascal to Lua script, many of those are just not used any longer but it's been quite fun and one hell of a learning exercise creating things with them, my last project was last year where i spent 18 months learning Japanese as the source code from the original arcade machine was in that language and had to convert it into something more modern and english.

In my modern life i still work in the industry but mainly concentrate on retro, i provide training for who those want to learn older techniques such as pixel art and chiptunes. I do the remix scene where i regularly contribute and write soundtracks mainly for indie's these days and generally do a lot of debugging work and write my own Graphic, Sound and Game engines but i get so much joy just talking about old games especially from the 8 bit era and do generally have a big smile when someone mentions a game that i may have worked on and still have plenty of emails etc from people that remember the good old day of gaming.

For me it's not just a job but an amazing passion that i so enjoy to this day and get paid for it and the only wish i have is that games return to be challenging and put the gamer first where they make the decisions rather than having everything handed to you but i do live in hope.

Love hearing about you all guys and gals too.

Something that stopped me doing game dev and really getting into coding as a kid in the late 80's/early 90's, is it was near impossible to find the information I needed. Spent weeks in the library reading books on graphics theory, but it was till 10 years later talking to a work colleague about his past did I find out how to write to the graphics buffer of a Spectrum.

Care to share a list here?

It's all web-based. The first line in the script if I hit F12 is: DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"

Thanks!

Should be entirely possible then. Javascript is what you need. I'm imagining you may not be able to share the software you use at work, which would help, but it's certainly possible to point you in the right direction with stuff :)

I basically just picked it up myself from StackOverflow and playing around, I started with one feature I wanted to develop (the forum search) and figured out how that worked, then made it work with the rest. (and Barefoot was very kind to let me borrow his menu implementation which helped a lot)

The actual meat of what you need to do depends on what the app is made with (JQuery, AngularJS, something else entirely), what information you want and what you want to do with it.

Feel free to PM me if you want and I'll see what I can do (though I'm not a very good teacher..)