Computer Programing School or self taught?

Dixie McCall

Dixie McCall

Well-known member
I don't know how you guys and gals do it in the programming world. This coding business is so head tiring. Much respect to all of you . I had one of the most stressful jobs anyone can have and I find CSS and programing more stressful. I mean this is like learning a new language. It's crazy how complicated coding is.

Is programing your main job or are forums a side deal? How did you learn programming? Formal education or self taught? I've tried self taught and it's frustrating me because I learn one thing and have to learn ten other things to implement the first thing. LOL Five hours later, I'm wanting to throw my PC across the room and my eyes are burning. LOL

Hats off to you all. I GREATLY admire your intelligence and so appreciative of your help.
 
Since you are talking about programmers who make the world go round, they sit all day long on comfortable seats, in large air-conditioned open spaces with comfortable salaries... Good for them, they studied for that but despite everything I reserve my admiration for other categories of workers...
 
Without programmers the majority of medical equipment wouldn't work. Same goes for power, water, water filtering, commercial food processing. My career uses extremely advanced and complicated medical equipment which wouldn't be available or serviceable without computer people. The medical programmers are phenomenal and some of the smartest people I've ever known-often times they are smarter than the doctors working these machines-scary thought. lol

I don't admire most doctors as that field is worse than politicians. I admire no politicians, actors, sports figures.... I do admire plumbers, electricians, food processors, medical people other than doctors and computer people etc.. The real "critical" people of this world.

Let programmers sit and make a ton of money-most provide valuable, and often critical need.
 
I work in machine automation as my day job, we design, build and program machinery for various types of factories.

I personally have worked with software that melts and manufactures steel beams and also software that peels, slices and prepares potatoes to make crisps.

We also have guys who work in the pharma industries writing software to make the medicines people take.

nicodak said:
Since you are talking about programmers who make the world go round, they sit all day long on comfortable seats, in large air-conditioned open spaces with comfortable salaries... Good for them, they studied for that but despite everything I reserve my admiration for other categories of workers...
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Can categorically deny this statement - the majority of programmers I know, work in old dingy offices, with poor lighting, poor ventilation and when going to site for installation purposes, often the conditions are even worse.

Maybe web programmers who work for big corporations have good working conditions, but the majority of "essential" programmers aren't working in luxury.
 
Lee said:
Can categorically deny this statement
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We were talking about the programmers who make the world go round, implying those who work in large companies ... GAFA for example. Anyway, even the programmers you know who work in bad conditions I'm not going to admire them especially, you yes? You have to review your scale of admiration then!

Lee said:
the majority of programmers I know, work in old dingy offices, with poor lighting, poor ventilation and when going to site for installation purposes, often the conditions are even worse
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Ha ha! What movie did you meet them in? What a cliché !!
 
I don't really do much programming these days but I was originally self-taught (BASIC on a C64), then picked up a couple humanities-focussed programming courses (lots of text handing and that sort of thing) in undergrad, then dBase III+ in library school (1989). Most recently, I taught myself Javascript for work (it was the default scripting language for our CRM system, though now is being replaced with a workflow/rules engine).

So basically, I know the fundamentals of programming but have to spend time learning specific languages. I am eyeing PHP since it seems to be so widely used these days but suspect that if I actually wanted someone to code an add-on for me, I'd hire my son (3rd year Computer Engineering with experience doing web dev on a co-op job) or his wife (4th year Computer Engineering).

I am also self-taught on HTML and used to manage a church's website a decade or so ago but am just getting into CSS and LESS with my Xenforo admin work.

My real forte these days is Transact-SQL (the dialect in MS SQL Server). Do a lot of reporting and BI work with our corporate systems, all of which run an SQL Server backend.
 
nicodak said:
We were talking about the programmers who make the world go round, implying those who work in large companies ... GAFA for example. Anyway, even the programmers you know who work in bad conditions I'm not going to admire them especially, you yes? You have to review your scale of admiration then!


Ha ha! What movie did you meet them in? What a cliché !!
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Not a cliché when it is reality my friend.

Nobody wants admiration. Merely correcting some factual inaccuracies. You believe what you wish though.
 
Finnigan said:
I mean this is like learning a new language.
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Nope- Its learning at least three languages at the same time. ;)

I am programming since... the late 80's. So its all natural...

But meanwhile I am only writing code in my free time, in my real job I am head of several developers. ;)

plus: HTML and CSS is not programming, thats layouting. :D
 
Hoffi said:
But meanwhile I am only writing code in my free time, in my real job I am head of several developers. ;)
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Yeah, I used to do all the customization work on our systems myself but there were just too many projects so now I have a team of two just focussed on that work. I am the department head and have both support (two other people, soon to be 3) and development reporting to me.
 
I learnt to program because I wanted to transfer a copy-protected program from a cassette tape onto a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk. Before I started I new nothing about programming and had an appalling grasp of math. By the time I'd succeed I had a good grasp of binary, hexadecimal and could program proficiently in 6502 assembly language. I taught myself but bought a book on 6502 opcodes.

I've found where computer languages are concerned it's generally better to set yourself a task and teach yourself because you get a far deeper understanding of what you can achieve with the code.
 
The first computer I ever worked on (as a maintenamce man):
(You didn't just pull a video card on this beast - you had to know how it worked down to which leg of which AND gate was bad!)
A nickle to the first person who can tell us what this is?

App0020.webp


App0052.webp


App0016.webp
 
Finnigan said:
I might still have my Commodore 64k in the garage. LOL And my mind is with it. That's how old I am. LOL
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My very first personal “Computer” was the Texas Instruments TI-99 that Bull Cosby used to pitch. You hooked it up to a TV for a monitor and storage was via cassette tape. Program Language was TI Basic. What fun! My first program was a very rudimentary Black Jack game.
 
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