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Originally Posted by krackato  What is the best way to go about becoming a programmer? |
Start small and do a lot of it!
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Which languages should an individual learn in this day and age?
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What language you should learn depends heavily on the field you want to be in. For example, in my field, console game development, C++ is king.
There are, however, a few languages that I think every programmer worth his salt
should learn:
* some basic Assembly, because it teaches you how processors work at the lowest (programmable) level
* Pascal is good to learn functional programming
* Java or C# are good choices to learn object oriented programming
* Optional: dabble with something like LISP to learn the difference between declarative programming and imperative programming.
In the end, a programming language is just a tool and while it may take a long time to absorb all the intricacies of each language, the hard thing to learn is how to write good software - and that doesn't depend on the language you use
at all.
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What are some things that wish you had known before starting out and learning how to program?
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Nothing, really. Learning this stuff was all a big adventure... I wouldn't want to spoil that for myself with too much pre-knowledge.
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What would you tell your younger self?
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That the other games looked cooler than what I made at the time, because they did not try to cram all their graphics resources uncompressed in the executable, which QBASIC could make no bigger than 640k under DOS.
And don't bother going to the university, because you'll drop out anyway and make a ton of money programming games (which was my biggest dream at the time).
Yes.
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What are the benefits and negatives of being a programmer?
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The bad: programming is, at times, very hard and difficult work.
The good: the sense of accomplishment once a project is done, creating something out of nothing and (in my field in particular) learning about the joy that your product brings to others.
The excellent: I get paid to stare at a certain
adventurer's boobs 5 days a week... seriously... that's my job*
* as one of the graphics programmers on the team, I have to make sure she and her world look as pretty as the designers and artists intend them to look.