"Happiness," Jubal stated, "lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing"
-- Robert Heinlein: To Sail Beyond the Sunset (p147)
When no outside activity is possible, I like to take my lonk finkers (sic!) at a programming project. It challenges my organization skills and positive results fill me with enthusiasm. I wish people were as easy to deal with as computers are.
Superimposed on the foreign languages I know and very often taking over them, to my friends' exasperation, I manage to deal in the following:
- BASIC: my first acquaintance;
- Assembler (Z80, 8086, 80386): from PEEK and POKE to powerful IDEs;
- LOGO: just the ZXSpectrum interpreter, and as a frog-model for my plotter interface (see below)
- FORTRAN: for debugging and small tricks for INCERC (the institute where I worked once-upon-a-time);
- Pascal: with its elegant, listing-consuming style;
- Prolog: a good way to represent fuzzy knowledge;
- LISP: fast to type and long to conceive; great for mind-screwing mathematicians; does a cool PL for AutoCAD;
- C: Unix's companion, and its OO superset, C++; as far as Windows is concerned I prefer Borland's API to MFC;
- ADA: I was working on an interpreter which I hoped will evolve in an ADA compiler under Windows, but I never managed to find time for it. I think that working on the implementation made me know ADA's BNF by heart :( yukk! <-pun intended ;)
- Java: Since the .NET is the future of communications, and Java is such a great OOPL that allows one to get classy results with a minimum of programming, and since it's crossing the platform barriers more than any other PL, I hoped Java'll be my preferred slang. But... all JDKs I worked with under Windows tend to be too buggy 4 my taste. For now I'll stick to the following two:
- JavaScript: the interpreted version of Java included in Netscape and then improved in Microsoft's own warped way as JScript seems to me as the choice OOPL: widely distributed engine on all platforms, friendly, freeware, fast turnout.
- perl: it's really practical and I already did lots of extraction with it. Thankyou, Mr. Larry Wall!!
In any of the above-listed languages, I need at least a week to get accomodated with a specific interpreter/compiler/IDE unknown to me (or already forgotten)
You may want to see my finished (or abandoned :) programs. For projects I have now on the drawing board, please see my list of current ones. My other pastime showcases available now are: Shareware, Literature and Making money :)