Programming

Is anyone here into programming of any sort

If so what's your favorite language and what's the most complicated thing you've ever written

I'm into programming.

Can I do it?

NAH

i've been writing on my secret megaproject for about a year now.

i cannot tell you what it is because it's a secret.

Computing Science Student here. Done plenty of programming for work/school/hobby.

I generally find most languages fun if you are using them where they excel. Right now I'm working in mostly C and some C#.

Without going into too much detail I just finished something relatively complicated (for me at least) at work. It was a tuning system that ran on a laptop for audio software on another device. You would plug your laptop into the system with an Ethernet cable and tune the system with a GUI on your laptop. Wasn't the most algorithmic-ly complicated thing, but definitely a lot of code.

If I had to pick a favorite though it would probably have to be Haskell. Functional programming is awesome!

http://learnyouahaskell.com/

This book is really great to get started. I met the author last year when he came to Canada (from Slovenia). Miran was super chill bad ass.

Playing around with Haskell and other functional languages puts a lot of focus on solving little problems, which was initially what was very fun and appealing about programming for me. It's kind of like a bunch of mini games :).

Had some fun last year in school writing A* search in a bunch of different functional languages. Lisp ((((((lol)))))))), Haskell, and Scala.

im teaching computers how to make music

nvm... im learning processing right now. pretty fun and easy (atm) :P

I did it as a kid. QBasic lol. And some VB. I think the best thing I ever made was a barely functional drawing program in QB. You should note that you could not use the mouse, you had to draw in a continuous line. Who knows why I did it as I am shit at drawing. I also modified a QB text game to include the beginnings of my own little universe. I think I only got a few pages in before I realized that game design is hard.

I almost never do anything now; I can do html/css stuff when needed but basically just by googling every step and then forgetting it as soon as I'm done.

Massive respect to the true programmers out there, you guys got cool brains.

Computer Science major as well.

Just moving to my Intro to Comp Sci course 2 after summer, so I know entry level C++ stuff. We did get to classes and pointers but I still fail to see which situations call for using them and where they benefit the program. So when I code, I typically don't use classes/pointers. I get them, but can't think of how to apply them.

This summer I've been teaching myself HTML, javascript, and PHP (mainly inspired by the candies.anywei site). Its been fun and javascript has really helped me understand object oriented programming a bit better than just jumping into C++. PHP is a bit frustrating with the syntax although not much more complicated, HTML is for all intents and purposes is easy. Hackthissite.com has some pretty neat programming objectives with different difficulties, yall should check it out. I've only done the word unscramble but that was still fun to do. Also Project Euler.

Lol

I'm mostly in the same boat at SAS. It's such a big pot of legacy bloat. Some of it is useful though. And it always helps to create macros.

Years back in college I had most fun writing in prolog. But at the same time, the most difficult program was in prolog as well. It was a project where you had to write an question/ answer system for a specified database with information on classical music pieces (eg. time written, composer, type of arrangement, key, location, name of piece, ....). The aim was to write a program which would give all the pieces which an arbitrary query asked. Eg. All pieces written for 4 violins or 2 pianos in austria between 1700 and 1800.

The fun starts with writing the parser to grammatically deconstruct the query. But that was just the beginning. The fucked up part was to translate the query into a semantically relevant query for the actual database itself, in prolog of course! After a while your head becomes stuck at all kinds of ambiguities and idiosyncrasies of natural language... And i was basically forced to hack my way out of it. That was one of the hardest parts. I started out relatively naive with the idea to crack some problem in the most elegant way possible. But after a while ( after a couple of complete revisions) there was no way but to use these ugly hacks just to be able to properly answer a specific set of questions.

Also, fuck you Chomsky! With your f-ing universal grammar. It's obvious how smart he is with elegantly hacking his own universal grammar. Way smarter than I can dream. But at the same time it's obvious that no matter how smart his paper model is, it'll never be of any real practical use. There just isnt a final universal grammar which is able to deal with all ambiguities and exceptions in an elegant way. At this level, language is more about statistics than about grammar. F-ing Chomsky.

Another programming topic? :)

I've been programming since I was 9 years old. Now I've been a professional programmer for the last 10 years in various kinds of projects from embedded systems to databases.

I started with C64 Basic and went through various programming languages from C to Python to Scheme to various assembly languages. I graduated as MSc in information engineering / applied mathematics. I also did a bit of post-graduate studies in machine vision and pattern recognition, but dropped that. Currently I'm studying "pure" mathematics but I lack the motivation to actually finish the studies.

About PHP, it's absolutely the most ridiculous language I've had to work with. The syntax isn't even that bad, the design of the whole language is a disaster. You can make bugs that are impossible to create in any other language.

Check this for some examples: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

  On 6/4/2013 at 1:21 AM, Zeffolia said:

Is anyone here into programming of any sort

 

If so what's your favorite language and what's the most complicated thing you've ever written

Haha, how did I guess that the MRA fuck-knuckle is a programmer?

;-)

I've done some simple stuff with C on a microcontroller, and I'm planning on using that to make a bitcrusher thingy. I'd really like to learn an all purpose language to try out a couple of idead I have laying around. Guess I'll stay with C or C++, but python looks nice as well.

Python is probably my favorite language if you actually need to get shit done and performance is not a big issue. C and assembler for low level stuff and optimization. Scheme when you want to blow your mind. Brainfuck to fuck your brain.

  On 6/4/2013 at 12:09 PM, Iain C said:

 

  On 6/4/2013 at 1:21 AM, Zeffolia said:

Is anyone here into programming of any sort

 

If so what's your favorite language and what's the most complicated thing you've ever written

Haha, how did I guess that the MRA fuck-knuckle is a programmer?

 

I'll look into python then. I'd like to use it with blender as well. Never heard of scheme, what's it good for?

I've worked in Java and I hated it. Moved on to MaxMSP which was pretty cool. I've worked on a bunch of patches at the university which has been both awesome and frustrating as shit. Then I worked in PureData a tiny, tiny bit which was frustrating because I was used to MaxMSP. There's also a bit of programming in After Effects, but that's more math stuff than actual programming... so yeah...

what?

  On 6/4/2013 at 7:54 AM, usagi said:

I did a couple years of a CompSci degree. Java was the starting language, then C/C++. did some other shit on the side, couple of assemly languages, couple of scripting languages. I was really interested in AI-oriented stuff but I dropped out eventually.

 

now at work I code in SAS, which is a statistically-oriented collection of software systems that includes its own proprietary language. it's dogshit, seriously. they have something of a monopoly on this in the stats field so they have little motivation to improve any of their systems. I don't know what they funnel their exorbitant licensing fees into. most of the time when I code in SAS, I bypass the built-in language and use SQL instead via the proc sql invocation.

I use SAS a bit at work. Mainly use STATA though and am learning R. For Excel I do quite a bit of complex VBA stuff.

  On 6/4/2013 at 1:38 PM, th555 said:

Never heard of scheme, what's it good for?

It's good for a wank.

*waits for someone to start jerking off about scheme*

  On 6/4/2013 at 1:58 PM, phling said:

 

  On 6/4/2013 at 1:38 PM, th555 said:

Never heard of scheme, what's it good for?

 

It's good for a wank.

 

*waits for someone to start jerking off about scheme*

 

It's interesting but pretty academic. It's a sort of dialect of Lisp which is a functional programming language. If you're used to conventional imperative or object oriented languages it's pretty mind bending. Variables are not used in the common sense and recursion is used instead of iterations, etc. Haskell is a bit more modern functional programming language if you find Lisp/Scheme syntax too hard to read.

Another programming paradigm that's pretty interesting but academic is declarative programming, like Prolog. In declarative programming you don't write "commands" but you give rules on relations between things.

Check this Sudoku solver written in 15 lines of code: http://programmablelife.blogspot.co.at/2012/07/adventures-in-declarative-programming.html

For some reason I'm a fan of the aesthetic of deliberately obtuse languages eg -

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
IM IN YR LOOP UPPIN YR VAR TIL BOTH SAEM VAR AN 10
    VISIBLE SUM OF VAR AN 1
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

>+++++++++[<++++++++>-]<.>+++++++[<++++>-]<+.+++++++..+++.>>>++++++++[<++++>-]
<.>>>++++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<---.<<<<.+++.------.--------.>>+.

  On 6/4/2013 at 2:26 PM, mcbpete said:

For some reason I'm a fan of the aesthetic of deliberately obtuse languages eg -

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
IM IN YR LOOP UPPIN YR VAR TIL BOTH SAEM VAR AN 10
    VISIBLE SUM OF VAR AN 1
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

>+++++++++[<++++++++>-]<.>+++++++[<++++>-]<+.+++++++..+++.>>>++++++++[<++++>-]
<.>>>++++++++++[<+++++++++>-]<---.<<<<.+++.------.--------.>>+.

Here's a compilation of "Hello World" source codes in some of the more esoteric ones - http://esolangs.org/wiki/Hello_world_program_in_esoteric_languages

 

You can write pretty esoteric code in conventional languages also. There's the International Obfuscated C Coding Contest for example. :)

Check this last year's winner of short programs. It converts text to numbers for cardinal numbers less than a quadrillion. (Eg "nineteen" -> 19)

  Quote

long long n,u,m,b;main(e,r)char **r;{f\

or(;n++||(e=getchar()|32)>=0;b="ynwtsflrabg"[n%=11]-e?b:b*8+

n)for(r=b%64-25;e<47&&b;b/=8)for(n=19;n;n["1+DIY/.K430x9\

G(kC["]-42&255^b||(m+=n>15?n:n>9?m%u*~-u:~(int)r?n+

!(int)r*16:n*16,b=0))u=1ll<<6177%n--*4;printf("%llx\n",m);}

  On 6/4/2013 at 2:24 PM, mokz said:

Another programming paradigm that's pretty interesting but academic is declarative programming, like Prolog. In declarative programming you don't write "commands" but you give rules on relations between things.

Check this Sudoku solver written in 15 lines of code: http://programmablelife.blogspot.co.at/2012/07/adventures-in-declarative-programming.html

this is a hello world program:

  Quote

AT

T--A

A----T

T-----A

T-----A

G----C

T--A

GC

CG

C--G

A----T

A-----T

T-----A

A----T

A--T

GC

AT

C--G

T----A

C-----G

T-----A

G----C

C--G

CG

AT

A--T

T----A

A-----T

A-----T

G----C

A--T

GC

TA

G--C

T----A

G-----C

C-----G

C----G

A--T

GC

TA

G--C

A----T

G-----C

A-----T

C----G

A--T

CG

GC

A--T

A----T

C-----G

A-----T

C----G

A--T

CG

GC

A--T

T----A

G-----C

A-----T

G----C

A--T

CG

GC

A--T

G----C

A-----T

A-----T

T----A

A--T

TA

AT

T--A

G----C

A-----T

A-----T

A----T

G--C

AT

AT

G--C

T----A

G-----C

A-----T

G----C

G--C

AT

TA

T--A

A----T

G-----C

G-----C

A----T

A--T

TA

AT

T--A

A----T

T-----A

G-----C

A----T

T--A

TA

AT

G--C

A----T

T-----A

A-----T

T----A

G--C

AT

TA

T--A

A----T

G-----C

G-----C

A----T

A--T

AT

AT

T--A

G----C

A-----T

No, in Prolog you basically build a machine to solve some specific logical problem. No problem is being solved at the compiling phase. Writing prolog is basically translating problems into propositional logic (horn clausules). Kinda like writing out some inductive proof for some problem.

edit: the posted link on the soduku gives an excellent explanation, btw

http://programmablelife.blogspot.co.at/2012/07/prolog-sudoku-solver-explained.html

cool stuff, I'm not that into formal logic so it sounded like a really strange concept.