|
I get asked so many questions! Here are some of them with answers...
|
How did you get involved in programming?
Via a very strange route actually. I always wanted to know how executable files were made. I also did a kudos thing at school when I was about 15 and all it did was ask you loads of questions and then recommend your perfect job to you from its database! Programming was my perfect job apparently.
Anyway I never new "how" to go about learning how to create software etc and to my astonishment there was a female computer programmer at my Tae Kwon Do lessons. I asked her how to get started and she basically said a lot of people start of with Visual Basic 6, then move to more advanced languages such as C++. To learn Visual Basic 6 she recommended a book called "SAMS Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours", although it took a lot longer than 24 hours!
|
How easy did you find it to create your first program?
It was surprising easy actually because I was learning Visual Basic. You could just drag and drop controls (text boxes, buttons, etc) and create your users interface. Compile it and you have an executable, your first program. Open it and you can see your interface. Coding it was very easy as well but it's harder to explain that verbally.
|
How easy did you find it to create programs?
Very easy! Although that was because VB would generate the entire user interface code and the syntax of VB is based on BASIC which really does make it easy to learn! Do not think that programming is easy though because understanding the language may be straight forward but creating an organized, well coded application is a whole different ball game which tends to come with experience.
|
What was your first real program, and what was it?
It was a text editor! It was quite a nice text editor as well with auto save features, code templates, and loads more. It was very good for practice and making a useful program actually helped me learn the language much faster and understand why you would use specific functions and so on.
|
When did you start learning your first language?
When I just turned 16 I think, or I could have still been 15 but it would have been a late 15. Anyway I started learning Visual Basic 6 from a book called "SAMS Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours".
|
What languages do you know now?
I know quite a few now considering I have only just turned 20 this month! However the main ones I use today are all primarily web development languages; PHP, JavaScript, CSS, XHTML, DHTML and SQL. However I do still know how to use Visual Basic 6 and I am currently learning a bit of Delphi.
|
Which is your favourite language and why?
It's got to be PHP. It's just so good at creating web pages and I like the syntax of the language.
|
What is your least favourite language and why?
Delphi! Although I think it's probably because I am still learning the language. So far though I am finding it difficult to learn the syntax. Instead of simple (what I am used to) syntax of using curly braces I am having to learn a syntax that replaces those with words like "do", "begin", "end", and so on. All the begins and ends are annoying to keep writing and keep track of.
|
How long does it take you to learn a new language?
I really can not answer that since every language is of different size and can do different things. Visual Basic you can learn pretty quick, asm will take you years and years to master properly.
|
I have heard that Visual Basic is a bad language. Do you agree?
Sort of. I have no regrets of learning the language for year because it taught me the very fundamentals of programming which made learning my next language much easier because I already understood programming concepts like functions, arrays, variables, and so on. However at the time VB6 was made in 1998 and so it was really outdated and I kept hitting some problems with the language such as large run times, limited manipulation of the windows forms, only ran on windows, active x ocx files had to be distributed with the programs, slow executables, and it made it hard to program anything outside of the actual visual basic application without directly accessing windows API's.
|
You mentioned you know some web development languages. What made you change from software to web development?
Fairly easy decision. After I had learnt a fair bit of VB it would not have been VB that I would have picked up jobs for. Most software engineers need university degree's to get recognized and I did not want to go university. The internet was also becoming more and more popular and the software industry was and still is very saturated and competitive. I also found it hard to distribute my programs without uploading them to a website and so I started creating my own website. This was how I started in web development and it just took off from there really.
|
Are you glad that you changed to web development as opposed to software development?
Defiantly! It's so much more productive in a short amount of time and I love the way you can create a website and people can easily use it without installing anything (most of the time). I also love the way that multiple languages all work together with each other to produce the final product.
|
What is your next move in the web development industry now?
To get better and to create a nice big network of websites to put in the MyPingle Network.
|
