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]

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.

I don't really have a lot of experience writing software for Windows - most of what I do is either net based (PHP or other server-side programming, and in a Linux environment) or built to fit into Linux, which is so liberating. Free, commercial-grade compiler with more free support and documentation than you can shake a stick at. I was once told that learning to program under Windows is like learning to dance while wearing a body cast, and as I've tried to do some things under Windows, I've seen how true that can be.

My primary system in my room, though, does dual-boot. I run Gentoo for coding, surfing the net, chatting... almost everything, really, and occasionally boot into Win2K Pro for Wintendo purposes. Well, that's not fair. I do also use a pirated photoshop. I've been meaning to learn how to use the GIMP, though, which is the free Linux analogue. Photoshop does have some extended features that the GIMP does not, but nothing I can reasonably expect to use anyway. =)

My goal is to get Wine working to the point where I can run my Windows partition as a virtual machine coccooned within Linux, so I don't have to drop everything and reboot to game. That'll take some doing, though. There's a Linux distro that pretty much allows the user to drop in an install CD for any Windows program and install and run it like normal, but you have to subscribe for that service, which is unrealistic for me.

Returning to .net, I could definitely see its usefullness if I were doing a lot of intra-Windows work, but I'm not. If I ever start, I'll certainly look into it again.

It's not entirely about efficiency, though that does matter. I'm all for quick and easy when it's warranted, such as using a scripting language for a program I'll only run a few times, or which only has a few instructions. When it comes to anything at all complex, though, or that I'll be using frequently, it's not uncommon for me to prototype the whole thing in Python so I can start using it instantly, then slowly convert it to C as time permits. It's really more of a hobby than an actual obsession. Good practice, if nothing else.

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[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.

I'm not perfect, either, but I take pride in trying to improve my habits, as opposed to others (not you, but the modern computing world in general) who seem to be increasingly comfortable with regressing into lazy programming in inefficient languages. I'm almost afraid to find out the minimum system requirements for Longhorn. lol

Anyway, I'm not trying to preach, here, just agreeing with a lot of what you said above. I have no doubt that for what you do, .net makes a lot of sense. When you need to rapidly design and redesign systems, letting the computer do the dirty work, even if you could do it better, can be a real lifesaver.

Time for bed, now, though. Heh. And I still have that new entry of yours to read. Forgive me; I'll have to get to it tomorrow. ;)