(no subject)

[chess]

I must be boring!

No-one's posted any comments on my LJ for aaages.

Anyway, today goes down in my personal history as The Day That The Eeeeevil Hairdresser Murdered My Hair. The decided they'd cut *four times* as much as I asked for off it - *8 inches* they cut off. I am Not Happy about this, although I've got more used to it than when I first worked out what they'd done. At least my hair still looks okay, and it still counts as long, it just doesn't count as exceptionally long any more. 67 cms. (it never was over a metre long, we worked out.) I think it'd still do the style in the picture on here, just about, although it doesn't extend further than that any more.

In other news, I got Talia to talk to aivas again!!! It was just a matter of hunting down all the connection speeds and taking them down a few notches. So that's veryvery good, and changes the day from 'disasterous' to 'okay', 'cos now we don't have to send off Talia to be fixed and all that mess.

I guess I probably have to think of an interesting question to ask everyone if I want answers. ATM I'm trying to vaguely kinda learn C (at school, with the compiler on my Psion, when waiting for exams) and Python for Stairwell. It's not helped by the fact I vaguely know what to do in them - just enough to make tutorials boring, not enough to skip half the tutorial or actually do anything useful. I've thought of a question that oughta get some comments - what language ought I be learning, and why?

Comments

[marble.livejournal.com]

If I had 8 inches chopped from my hair, I'd be headless... :)

As for languages... what do you want to do? Some languages are much better suited to certain tasks than others. Personally, I like C++ in general, or perl/awk for string processing type stuff, and python for interactive messing about with ideas (eg. testing COM objects on windows).
Lots of people seem to be scared by C++, but it's fluffy and cuddly really. Most of the tricky stuff is just in there for people writing the standard libraries, and you don't have to worry about it.

[chess]

I just have this random desire to 'learn programming'. I'm only going to do 25% compsci at Uni (if of course my ideas of what course I want don't entirely change), and prolly only do that in the first year, but I'd just like to be able to say 'I can code', really.

Yes, I'm a horrible little wannabe geek...

[jarel.livejournal.com]

I'd say C is about the most widely-useful language you could learn, and it also gives you a start on learning others.

After that my personal recommendation would probably be Java; I found it's a nice language to work in (and you concentrate on what you want to do, rather than fiddling about with memory manaegment and pointer arithmetic!), and it would also would be a way to learn a consistent approach to object oriented stuff.

Just my 2p :)

[albanach.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, not sure I would want to learn to program in C, though it's not a hugely difficult language to achieve stuff with... on the other hand, Java has lots of similarities, and with applets you can quickly get nice results with a graphical interface and there are loads of beginners books that really don't expect you to have any experience elsewhere. The third edition of "Java for Students" will be out next month which seems to be a popular first year University textbook.

Why not take a look at the sites of universities you're thinking of going to and see what programming language you're likely to do there. Then you can decide whether you want to go and know all about that language before you arrive, or if you fancy a challenge, you might see that as a reason to study a different language altogether.... another 2p worth, keep getting these and you'll be able to retire soon :)

[chess]

I 'learnt to program' in Basic on a Spectrum at the age of three or four. What I'm looking for is useful languages to actually learn (asin, learn to do things that might be moderately useful in)...

[passage.livejournal.com]

Yeah working Psions are good!

You know when you got your Psion I thought "SHe'll have a nicer, newer Psion than me" but infact you've found so many ways to destroy it so very fast, what do you have agianst poor iclke Talia?

Anyway, Amos Pro is a lovely langauge, but you'll need an Amiga if you want to do that.

Other than that learn C, cos it rocks deeply and I am told that once you know C you can hack just about any other (non assembler) programming language.

Neil

Marnism

[passage.livejournal.com]

Warning, warning:
Marnism detected!

Surely I can't be turning into a Marn clone? I don't have the hair for it, ah well.

Neil

Assembler, too

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Or even non-non-assembler. One of the most important parts of hacking assembler is that understanding the idea of pointers (and pointers to pointers, and so on), since this is how computers really work underneath. Many languages, including Java, hide you from this, but C makes no attempt to.

[pling.livejournal.com]

67cm measured from where? The nape of the neck or the crown of your head? Just curious, so's I can compare hair length with you (with both the before and the after ;) ).

Cheer up though - I had 8 inches cut off my hair (about 5 years ago) to even up the fringe I'd grown out about 5 years before that. And even John wasn't quite sure if I'd had it done yet or not ;) So yeah - traumatic for you, I'd hate it if I hadn't wanted it cut much :( But not very many people will notice enough to be sure it's happened.

And, ooc, why go to hair-dressers? I've had my mother trim my hair twice (once 8 inches and once just 1 inch) and been to the hair-dressers once (to get it dyed promarily, but I had a small trim while I was there) since I started growing my hair long again nearly 11 years ago. For that matter, first time I ever had my hair cut was when I was 11 years old.

[chess]

Crown of my head. (I was trying for the maximum length, y'see.)