Comment by qubyte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qubyte | Hacker News Reader

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I want the education sector to start treating the ability to programme as they do literacy and numeracy. Everyone should know how to write a letter and read, but not necessarily write a novel. Everyone should know how to count, but not need to win the Fields Medal. I believe that everyone should be comfortable with looking at a script and tweak it to their needs, but not necessarily have to create a AAA game from scratch.

I was vaguely aware of programming as a child, but had no education (unless you count mailmerge and a broken floor-turtle) and certainly no encouragement at school (in the UK if my spelling hasn't given it away). I basically forgot all about it until the middle of my degree (physics) when C was mandatory. It took until two years after a PhD to work out that a career in programming was what I really wanted.

Do I regret the way I got here? Nope. I learnt a lot of cool stuff along the way. But had it not been for that C course I may never have worked out what I wanted. I got lucky, and luck should not be a factor.

> I was vaguely aware of programming as a child, but had no education (unless you count mailmerge and a broken floor-turtle) and certainly no encouragement at school (in the UK if my spelling hasn't given it away).

I too was very vaguely aware, but in the mid nineties all I ever came across was Windows. Hell, I didn't start programming until I was 31, everyone else on this thread makes me feel like a real late starter.

> I basically forgot all about it until the middle of my degree (physics) when C was mandatory.

I thought FORTRAN would have been a good candidate for a mandatory language in a physics degree.

It was an option the year before, but not enough people wanted to take it and the class was cancelled. I'm glad to have learnt C, because it came with an introduction to bash and ssh. Whilst the terminals we used were windows, we were logging into a linux box via putty. This way I got to learn the UNIX way of writing tiny, single purpose programs that operate on STDIN and STDOUT for piping together. I guess the philosophical education was at least as important as the code itself.

> It was an option the year before, but not enough people wanted to take it and the class was cancelled.

Makes me wonder, if you were taking a physics degree now what would be on the table?

I started on C++, then downgraded to C, I prefer life to be simple (?$%?). I also threw out the IDE's and installed ubuntu alongside Windows.

A few weeks ago I lost my desktop and could only work in recovery mode. It was great, like living in the 1970's. tty only, using Vim and Joe as editors and reading help pages with elinks. Bash is smashing.

I believe python is popular these days, but I think C is still the language of choice. A few years back when I was a TA I was tutoring on a C course at Leeds university, and Sussex (where I did my undergrad) they're pretty hardcore, so I reckon it's still C with the occasional course in F77.

I started on emacs with that C course. These days I use sublime text for my own machines, and vim elsewhere (although I'm not very good). The end result of all this? I finish sentences with a semicolon and save with colon-w-q (or x, but wq is way more satisfying); :wq

I was wondering if Haskell would be good for scientific computation. It has bignum like Python, but I think it is more popular among mathematicians than physicists.

Joe can emulate Emacs, Pico and another editor called WordStar (which I think is hardly ever used these days), but it doesn't emulate Vi. Perhaps the guy who wrote it hates Vi. Interestingly I believe Vi was designed for writing C source. Bill Joy was working on the first BSD OS around the same time, the original Vi was probably involved in the bootstrapping process.

If you want a massive list of editors:

http://texteditors.org

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