If programming was like baking a cake...

[moonman239]

Python programming would be like making cake with cake mix & prepared frosting - it's easy, but you're limited to the selections available at the store.
C programming would be like choosing your own flavor of cake & frosting - you sometimes have a bit of flexibility over how much work you do. Don't like the store's offerings, make your own cake - just be aware that it will take longer, as you are now responsible for assembling all the ingredients (eggs, flour, milk, etc.)
Assembly programming would be like making your own cake with little or no outside help - you can bake whatever kind of cake you want, but you are responsible for the generation of the ingredients - you have to grow the grains, take care of & milk the cows, and take care of/collect the eggs from the chickens.

 

[AngerDanger]

If sentence structure were like programming, this thread's title might not compile without throwing a subjunctive past exception.

 

[D.T.]

A for concept, C- for execution.

 

[yg17]

And then the QA testers take it out of the oven halfway through baking, even though you explicitly told them in an e-mail it wasn't ready yet and to wait, then bitch and complain that it tasted like **** and was all wrong.

 

[Huntn]

As someone who mostly has dealt with bbcode in my forum messages, what would you suggest as a good way to get your beginner's feet wet with programming? And of course what runs best on iOS, the PC versus MacOS?

Although 4 years old, this article is amusing: I Want To Be A Game Developer, Now What?

 

[D.T.]

As someone who mostly has dealt with bbcode in my forum messages, what would you suggest as a good way to get your beginner's feet wet with programming? And of course what runs best on iOS, the PC versus MacOS?

Lots of ways, lots of options

BBCODE is basically a form of markup, like HTML (though it's domain specificity is very narrow, since it's only within a BB based message board). So you could start by just getting a good, free editor (TextWrangler for a nice UI, or some text based editor right from the terminal), and writing some HTML, since you can open the resulting file right in a browser from your desktop. Then start looking at extending HTML by using CSS. HTML is the basic document structure and content, CSS allows you style that to get layout constructs, change typography, colors, etc. Then the next step would be to add Javascript into those same pages, that allow you to programmatically control the content, structure, style and manipulate the document dynamically.

So markup is a language, Javascript is certainly a programming language, you might want to explore something a little more, call it, traditional. Right on your Mac, you should have both Python and Ruby installed. Two general purpose, object oriented languages (markup and CSS are DSLs, domain specific languages). With an editor you can write little apps in either, run them, and start understanding basics like variables, control flow, then move into things like classes/objects, etc. Running these apps happens in a terminal window, they're interpreted, so there's no compile step, it's more or less, #ruby someappiwrote.rb and it'll do it's thing (probably send 'hello world' to the console )

If you want to get in a little deeper, maybe by writing a web app that has server side components, there are web frameworks for both Python and Ruby, and even Javascript (it can run both client and server side), or a dozen other languages. A framework extends a language into some additional domain, in the case of the web, gives it functions to handle things like HTTP responses, URL encoding, generating output back to the client (i.e. web browser) usually via some kind of templating engine (where you would mix both markup [HTML/CSS] and server side code).

That's a pretty broad stroke, ask anything specific you'd like.

 

[Wondercow]

If sentence structure were like programming, this thread's title might not compile without throwing a subjunctive past exception.

Subjunctive isn't a grammatical requirement of English and tends to see stronger use in American English than in other Engli

 

[Tech198]

i'm getting hungry already.... Don't make me program....

Probably i bit more complicated than a cake. You forgot about fixing bugs..

After you compile code this would be the equivalent of sticking a cake in the oven and cannot touch it till it's cooled to find how bad/good it tastes.

 

[LizKat]

Back in the early days of commerical computing, everything in programming was done in batch mode. "The computer room" was the exclusive domain of the high priests of mainframe operation, so you could submit a source program and wait for over 24 hours to find out if the thing even compiled. One could go half mad behind it.