Favourite thing about programming??

sw33t_r3v3ng3

What do you love about programming? what got you started and what language is your favourite??

mine is php because i love building things and seeing how they work..

danniemcq

Mod

moved from After Hours

jimgoose

I discovered programming in 1986 at the age of fourteen, on an 8-bit Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K of core memory. A Windows shortcut or empty Word document is bigger these days! I clicked immediately with the elegant simplicity of Z80 assembler and Sinclair BASIC, and became hooked. Since then, I have used and mastered many languages - several assembler dialects, including superscalar machines such as SPARC, Pascal, CoBOL, RPG, APL, C, C++, Perl, Python, the shells - and the Spartan purity and mercilessness of C still pleases me immensely. :cool:

These days, one of my favourite things is making Java programmer's heads explode with the superscalar delay-slot:

#include <sys/syscall.h>
#include <sys/trap.h>

  .global main

  .type foo,#function
  .type main,#function

  .section ".rodata"

string:
  .align 4
  .section ".text"

main:
  call foo
  nop
  ba _Finish
  mov SYS_exit,%g1             

_Finish:
  ta ST_SYSCALL

:cool:

srsly78

My favourite thing is the money. Oh and I like code as well.

Creamy Goodness

That **** yeah feeling when you solve something that was bugging you for the morning and then you fix it. and the money, blackjack, the hookers and blow.

jester77

I'm still waiting for the reality show about developers. Models, musicians, farmers, fat people, bachelors, amateur cooks, entrepreneurs have all been done. Developers are overdue their own reality show and that is what will have made it worth it!

fergalr

jester77 wrote: »

I'm still waiting for the reality show about developers. Models, musicians, farmers, fat people, bachelors, amateur cooks, entrepreneurs have all been done. Developers are overdue their own reality show and that is what will have made it worth it!

Just watch Ardvarkk'd
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NRL7YsXjSg

That'll soon stop you asking for reality shows about developers.

Sparks

jester77 wrote: »

I'm still waiting for the reality show about developers. Models, musicians, farmers, fat people, bachelors, amateur cooks, entrepreneurs have all been done. Developers are overdue their own reality show and that is what will have made it worth it!

Been done. And it was utterly, horrifically, please-pass-me-the-eye-bleach cringe-inducing tripe.

fergalr

I didn't even want to mention that one.


There was a thread on here before, about documentaries for developers etc.

If you want something similar, you could want 'indie game: the movie' its on netflix, quite watchable, and basically all the main characters are developers

fergalr

Favourite thing about programming:

Software.

The leverage inherent in software. The fundamental power of the technology.

Its incredible to potentially write something once that can run millions of times with practically zero marginal cost.

This gives amazing leverage to the people who can write software.

Now, such, there's not that many companies where 30 developers serve 100M users... ...but the potential is always there. And that's amazing. We aren't even scratching the surface of how that's going to reshape the world.

Programming is the cutting edge of that. Software is just an amazing amazing technology. Still totally unappreciated.


The potential to write intelligent systems is amazing too, even if we are still only starting to see how to do this.


And also, the practice of programming. God, its hard. Sometimes I wish I had a job where I could just fall into a rhythm and pass the time. But only ever briefly.

There really aren't actually that many jobs where you get paid to think, and where you can potentially solve different problems all the time. (Yes, not every software job is like this; we've all done 'drudgery' projects; but many more are vs. jobs in many other disciplines.)

I love software and programming; so many favourite things about them :-)

ChRoMe

fergalr wrote: »

I didn't even want to mention that one.


There was a thread on here before, about documentaries for developers etc.

If you want something similar, you could want 'indie game: the movie' its on netflix, quite watchable, and basically all the main characters are developers

As a hobby game developer, I've lost count of the amount of times I've watched that, the soundtrack stands on its own as well.

GreeBo

Favourite thing for me is taking on a larger than I really should in one go refactor in the afternoon off a Friday...ploughing away with nothing even compiling nevermind running or tests passing, gradually completing it, chipping away at the error count until I refactor the last class and boom, build complete.

Check-in, push and have a nice weekend baby!

Sparks

Ooooo, pushing a big delta last thing on a Friday. Living dangerously!

Colonel Panic

Writing lock free data structures even though I can spare the few ms to acquire a lock without it putting a dent in my big-O. So, superfluous optimisation as opposed to premature.

fergalr

Colonel Panic wrote: »

Writing lock free data structures even though I can spare the few ms to acquire a lock without it putting a dent in my big-O. So, superfluous optimisation as opposed to premature.

The "Getting Obsessed with Perfect Design" thread is over there.

amen

taking a manual and/or inefficient process and writing some code to make it super efficient/quick

waking up with a solution to an error/bug

being told something is impossible to program, spending a few hours (or mins sometimes) and showing a working prototype

the whole I wrote this and its been running for x years helping x000,000 of people

working on Open Source projects and getting a thank you email from end users

Sparks

Sometimes it's something very simple, like this. Sometimes it's solving a problem with a completely different mindset, like when you go from procedural to functional languages. Sometimes it's finding an answer after a day spent pulling out my own hair trying to solve a problem. Sometimes it's solving a really arcane technical issue with a new approach, sometimes it's finding a really simple way to do something that used to be really tedious, and sometimes it's finding a whole new language that makes difficult tasks ridiculously easy.

Bottom line, there are interesting problems, lots of them and they're all different and we keep coming up with new ways to attack whole problem areas and finding new ones beyond them.

There are downsides to this job, but frankly, they're not from the actual work itself, they're all from how the work and the business side collide. Things like crunches/death marches and the masochistic tendency this industry has to treat the "number of hours worked this week" metric in the same way college students treat the "number of shots drunk this evening" metric...

Colonel Panic

fergalr wrote: »

The "Getting Obsessed with Perfect Design" thread is over there.

I guess the joke was too subtle.

Should've spelled it out in a functional spec.

Sparks

Or a TPS report.

GreeBo

Sparks wrote: »

Ooooo, pushing a big delta last thing on a Friday. Living dangerously!

Not that dangerous, I make sure no one has my mobile number...any fallout is Mondays problem!

I do love finally getting some large change merged back in, particularly when its been living out on your own branch for ages and you are sick of trying to merge back into your new fangled version...


But yeah, sometimes its quite rewarding just to get the "hello world" response that you were expecting...5hours ago

Sparks

GreeBo wrote: »

Not that dangerous, I make sure no one has my mobile number...any fallout is Mondays problem!

Screw you, Future Me!

not1but4

When you take on a project which you have no idea where to even start then having a few 'pulling out your hair' moments but after a while things start to fall into place and you start to enjoy it.

After writing some complex code and it works perfectly first time upon running it, sadly this is very rare.

When its in the middle of winter and its lashing, you see some poor builders working outside while I am sitting in a air conditioned office being paid to solve puzzles.

amen

reducing the time a complex SQL query runs in from 40 minutes to 10 seconds

Creamy Goodness

woah, 40 minutes.

I used to work in a certain place where if queries locked a particular table for more than a second you'd be having a real bad day

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

getting bug reports in a big android app, fixing said bug and then pushing out to 2million daily users.
then you get all the thank you emails and rating changes, just feels good mang

sw33t_r3v3ng3

georgiecasey wrote: »

getting bug reports in a big android app, fixing said bug and then pushing out to 2million daily users.
then you get all the thank you emails and rating changes, just feels good mang

Who the **** Do you work for :O

SilverScreen

My favourite thing is helping out someone who says they've been trying to fix a bug for nearly an hour, finding the bug in less than a minute, getting a pat on the back and then going away feeling all awesome and smug.

biko

I started on oldskool IBM mainframe with stuff like cobol, jcl, vsam, db2 but have no particular favourite thing about programming except for the satisfaction when it works.

Boskowski

I take pleasure in breaking a bunch of complex problems into a lot of simple parts and then put it back together and create something that is well designed and well implemented and it shows when you see it working and it shows when you have to change it or add to it. In a nerdy way there is a beauty to such a thing.

amen

biko wrote: »

I started on oldskool IBM mainframe with stuff like cobol, jcl, vsam, db2 but have no particular favourite thing about programming except for the satisfaction when it works.

ha me too except I was writing PL/1

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

sw33t_r3v3ng3 wrote: »

Who the **** Do you work for :O

myself! mobile is huge. there's loads of big apps that you probably never heard of. stupid apps like.