Saturday, September 15, 2007

What kind of a programmer are you?

I really like watching Google's TechTalks, since they bring some brilliant lecturers, and sometimes they find fascinating topics to talk about.
Lately I've been watching the talk about Quicksilver, which is, in short, a sophisticated command line interface to many common computer tasks. I really wanted to have such interface for my own computer, but I couldn't, since I use Linux, and Quicksilver is a Mac-only product. So, after a short search, I found some alternatives, and decided to give Gnome Launch Box a try. After using it for less than an hour, I decided that this is a great piece of software, and that I should help in development. So I checked-out the source code using subversion, and started browsing it. The source is C code, which I hadn't programmed since the second year of my B.Sc, which was about 7 years ago. Even though I thought I was quite good at C, my brain wouldn't want to watch the horrible look of C and Gtk+ source code, so I decided to leave it to those who wouldn't care hacking in C.
After some reading and googling, I found a fork of Gnome Launch Box, called Gnome Do, which is actually a port of the source code to C#. Now we are talking. Finally I can start coding and contribute to the community that created such a wonderful product. But then again, reading the source files made me think that most of it is about GUI, and very little is about the "brain". I hate GUI programming. I think that's because I was never good at it. So instead of giving it a try, I left it, promising to myself that maybe sometime soon I will get back to it, overcoming my "hatred" of GUI programming, and contribute back to the product that I think that really deserves it.
What do you think? Am I weird? Is it wrong that one would prefer a specific kind of programming? Does experiencing in different types of programming makes you a better one?

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Programming languages syntax - it's all the same

Today I had the "pleasure" to debug (actually, help debug) some 7-years-old VB code, part of an ASP website. At first I thought "the last time it touched VB was 11 years ago", but even so, I decided to give it a try. To my own surprise, I discovered I still know some of the language, and the parts I didn't know, I guessed by knowing the syntax and techniques of other (modern) programming languages.
After doing so, I was quite pleased of my "newly" acquired knowledge of VB, so I guess I might mention in a job interview that I still know a language I think I never really knew. This is only because I know other languages, and what's the difference?

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Hello, world!

My first blog post on the internet. Up until now, I only blogged in my corporate intra net, which meant posts were in Hebrew, and the audience was quite small.
As for the title of this post, I never really understood why is there a comma and an exclamation mark in the phrase "hello world". Anyhow, like in every programming language, the first thing written is "Hello, world!", so I decided it would be nice to label my first post accordingly.
Now I have to think about what should I write in this blog. I guess it'll be something related with
computer technologies and some real life issues. Well... time will tell.