On May 15, 2:17 pm, DanH <[email protected]> wrote: > If you look around, about half those posting here (and on other forums > for other platforms) are kids who have essentially no programmer > training but have managed to modify a few example projects to do > interesting (to them) things and hence consider themselves to be > programmers. They all believe that they have (or very shortly will > have) the next killer app (which is usually a game) and are only > months away from striking it rich (if only those curmudgeons on the > forums would answer their queries with a few hundred lines of free > code rather than cryptic "read the documentation" responses).
Wow. I haven't been around here long enough to comment on how true or untrue that is, but I will say that if anyone looks at me that way, please don't. Yes, I do have some ideas for niche apps that may (or may not) make any money. Yes, I do learn best by taking example code, along with reference material, and learning by example and by applying whatever it is that I'm learning. I DO sometimes ask stupid questions, but I'm not looking for someone to post a few hundred lines of free code.... A simple pointer to the appropriate documentation is every bit as welcome to me. If I'm asking the question, it means I looked, but didn't find said documentation. Maybe I looked in the wrong place, maybe I searched for the wrong thing, or maybe, given the damage done to my sight (that would be the three brain surgeries to remove three brain tumors) and to my cognitive abilities (it's commonly referred to as "chemobrain"). I used to have a 153+ (the test only went to 153, so I don't know what I would have scored had it gone to a more reasonable level) IQ. I haven't been tested since my cancer nightmare, so I have no idea where it is now. > (The #1 requirement for programming is a love of it that surpasses > your love for money and often your love of food and sleep.) I can see where that is true in many cases, but do not make the assumption that it is universally true; it isn't. Aside from a few classes in college in which I wrote code in 8088 assembly, and another where I had to deal with Fortran, I did quite a bit of C, combined with Lex and Yacc, also combined with shell (Bourne shell at the time), sed, awk, etc. Now, most of what I do (on the PC and Unix side) is Tcl/Tk. If you're curious, take a look at the hurricane tracking program I wrote. It's called JStrack, and is online at http://www.jstrack.org/jstrack/ (jstrack.org is a site donated by one of my users). See the brewing section for a couple of brewing-related programs. Before Tcl/Tk, I did most everything in C, including, at my first job out of college (Network Engineer at Amoco Corporation's Network Design group), where I wrote a network disaster and capacity planning simulator for the N.E.T. IDNX multiplexer. My code was based on the actual IDNX routing algorithm. I never saw the actual code---I just wrote my own to implement its algorithm. In a test against a professionally-developed system, theirs failed to route circuits we had on our network, where mine routed them correctly (and they WERE working with the actual code, where again, I had the specs, but not the code, and implemented it in my own C code). It was part of my daily life at work, as I was the design engineer for the corporate backbone network (ALL of Amoco's most critical networks rode over my network). But the point here, which so far I've missed getting to, is that when I code, it's normally to solve some problem, or address a specific immediate need for which writing code is the best solution. I don't love writing code. I don't dislike it, either. It's a tool that I use when I need it. As for the money side of things, I am a cancer survivor living on a monthly Social Security Disability deposit. Even a small amount of extra cash would be a huge benefit for me, so while I don't expect to strike it rich (though I certainly would not complain if I did!), I am hoping to make that extra $25 or $50 per month that could make a big difference. Will I get that much from anything I write? Who knows. But I'll never know unless I try, right? With that, the migraine I had all last week has trying to come back all day, and is trying even harder now...so I should probably get away from this computer ASAP so I can get back to learning and coding tomorrow. :-) Later, --jim -- 73 de N5IAL/4 Web site: http://www.jstrack.org E-mail: [email protected] "Do not look into waveguide with remaining eye." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
