During my short stint in college -- the first semester of an engineering program -- the main language being taught was Fortran, and the machine being used was a Vax mainframe. After dropping out and getting a Commodore 128, I learned a little BASIC and more 8502 and Z80 assembly programming, and later some C. A few years later, the first Internet provider opened for business in the area, and they had a Unix system (SunOS, I think) that you could shell into as part of your account. So I started learning shell/awk/sed (still logging in with a terminal program on my C128), and that led pretty quickly to Perl.
I think it worked out for the best. I might have learned some useful programming theory and algorithms and such had I stayed in college, but the language and OS were already on their way out. On my own, I stumbled into languages and systems that I'm still using today, so very little learning has been wasted since then (except a few days I once spent learning ActionScript because I was thinking of writing a Flash game). I did learn Java when it was the Next Big Thing, which I try to stay away from now, but I still consider that useful since it taught me that OOP isn't the answer to everything.
Aaron B.
Available for small or large Perl jobs; see my home node.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|