Learning

[allsorts46]

Hmm, fairly normal few days with some odd other bits thrown in. To resume from the last (meaningful) entry, the situation... well, was never resolved, but went away anyway. It'll be back I've no doubt, but there's always something to keep my life interesting anyway. I've noticed that my happiness seems to now be tied almost entirely to monetary

Comments

[parallaxlioness]

Ethereal certainly is a lil' beauty, isn't she? =)

I don't know that I'll ever understand why you're so in love with .net, though. I have very little experience with it, myself, but what I saw was enough to make me avoid it. But then, I prefer C to C++, and ASM when I can afford to take the time. I'm an efficiency zealot, I guess. If nothing else, though, C++ sure can be fun. =)

Still, when I want a really fun language, I'll just fire up old vi and let some Perl or (more commonly) Python flow from my fingertips. Yes, it's slow, and no, I don't really do anything useful with it, but it's fun. ;)

Oh, and congrats on understanding TCP! For me, that was one of those things that, try as anyone, man or book might, I could just not be taught. Finally, for no apparent reason and without any apparent provocation, it just "clicked" in my head and I thought, "Oh, that's how it works! Definitely useful to know, and opens up a lot of potentially interesting little projects

[allsorts46]

.net is very good if you're very lazy. Like you, at heart I do prefer the control that lower-level languages give you - I've worked with assembly and C and such, but I have the problem that I never get anything done. I know I'm capable of it, but everything just takes so long to build up that I give up before it's finished. That's why (which I probably deserve to be shot for) I've typically turned to Visual Basic when I want something done until now - I hate it, I really really hate it, but it's quick and easy. When .net promised to bring that to C++, I couldn't resist. Depends what you are trying to do of course, but if you want to create a Windows application quickly, you can go through 30 lines or so of traditional API stuff, or you can use

[allsorts46]

Strangely, even. Strangle is an interesting choice of word, but not the one I was looking for.

I wonder if LJ will ever support editing comments?

[parallaxlioness]

If you can manage to clear the hurdle of the install process, you might consider trying out Gentoo as a distro. Red Hat can be awful with installations, and Debian's just okay. With Gentoo, however, when I want a program - let's say firefox - I just type "emerge firefox" and it goes to something called the portage tree, figures out all the dependencies, downloads them, compiles them to my system, and then eventually does the same with the actual program. And if I don't want to wait for all the compiling to go on, I can just open another terminal (or background that first process) and type "emerge firefox-bin" which is just what it sounds like. =) Works like magic and gets you custom-compiled, extremely efficient programs for free

Did you know there's a maximum comment size?

[parallaxlioness]

I do get kind of concerned about the attitude of a lot of programmers nowadays, especially in the classes where programmers are taught. Teachers seem to spread this attitude of "Our hardware is faster, so it's okay to let our programs get bloated to match." We've all heard of Moore's law, but the irony is that software efficiency seems to be inversely proportional. Some of it's that we're just running more complex, graphic-heavy programs, but a lot of it is also poorly designed languages and lazy programmers, particularly on the corporate level. I'll never forget the day I realized that Microsoft Office is barely able to fit on a CD, compressed, but OpenOffice is something like 65MB, and very much comparable. =) The sheer overhead of a single Word document, for instance, or the unreal amount of resources that Minesweeper takes to run... sometimes it seems hilarious, sometimes, just depressing