As I have said before, I make my money programming these days. It's the (probable) last stop in a varied career where I have been a Sports Reporter/Columnist, a radio station Sports Announcer, a PR flack for the American Contract Bridge League, an arena announcer for the Continental Basketball Association Toronto Tornadoes and have been involved in a comic store operation.
But for the last umpteen years, I have used Borland/CodeGear products like Paradox and then Delphi to do my programming work. I've done a fair bit of stuff that I'm proud of, yet I cringe whenever I see anything older than about three years. I get better virtually daily, learning something new just about weekly. For instance, I have finally figured out how to inform somebody selecting from a list that what they typed isn't IN the list, and that the automatic matching stopped a few keystrokes ago. A LOT of people just ignore beeps and popups. You'd be surprised. Now, I've developed a method that does NOT allow them to ignore my warnings. Very gratifying. To me.
I'm completely self-taught as a programmer. I did get some computer credits during my time at York University (while I was in high school). But the language of choice back then was Basic and Fortran. I write in Delphi's dialect of Pascal these days.
Pascal is what is called a Strongly Typed language. Had Windows been written in Pascal, we'd have one gazillionth (gazillion being the million-dollar word of the day, you'll see) of the security problems that the operating system has today. The buffer overflows that permeate Windows would actually be rarities if the system was written in Pascal. But c'est la vie.
Most of my learning is picking apart working example code. I'm a copy, paste, change and compile kind of learner. I have the books. I've watched seminars and training videos. And it all comes down to doing the changes yourself and seeing the effects. I know SOME programmers can just sit down and write code top to bottom. I can't. It's all got to be done piecemeal. And on my biggest project, I've got a little over two million lines of code written over the last 15 years. That's a lot of bacon.
Today, programmers write for the web, THEN the desktop. Using Visual Studio from Microsoft to write .Net framework stuff is the fastest route to employment for many new programmers. Hot new languages like PHP and Python and Ruby on Rails have supplanted Java and even C# as the environments of the moment. Lots of ads out there for them, too.
Delphi just simply chugs along as being one of the best implementations of one of the best programming languages ever. It lets an uneducated guy like me make a decent living making pretty decent programs. Easy to learn, efficient working output and still room for newbies to make their mark. I invite any young programmer-to-be to check it out.
Just stay away from my clients.
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