Start Off???

[Styth]

Everyone started off somehow. Now the question is how did you? Explain How you started programming and what language you started with.

[iago]

I went to my local library and got some books on QBasic, and learned how to program that, got really good at that, then moved up to visual basic, which I taught myself with no books/internet.. it's so similar to QBasic it was easy.  Then I took vb, then c++, then c, then Java in school.

[drake]

MMM well technically speaking, my cousin introduced me to BASIC when I was like 12. I toyed around with it but got bored cause it wasn't very useful during the time period. Then less than a year later I started making websites, then I heard about Javascript, learned it, then I heard about Perl, learned it, then I heard about PHP, learned, then I heard about Java, C++, Visual Basic, and learned them all. While at the same time of learning these languages spending time fine tuning the others.

Its quite obvious though that I started with web programming before moving into Windows API with C++ and VB. Just look at the web development forum and who posts the most.

[Camel]

Beware, ultra long history lesson:

Back in the days when I still ran Win95, I added a few lines of code to my autoexec.bat file -- with the help of a DOS book -- to make my console windows display the time and working directory in color on the first line via 'prompt.' I learned of BASIC when I was probably 10 or 11, and have been at it ever since. Learning C was sort of a mixed blessing -- it helped me understand what the hell I was doing in VB, but also made me realise how much VB sucks (the relative power of VB, anyways). Now I write anal VB code.

Sometime when I was running Win98, I found Personal Web Server (PWS -- or PMS as I mused) and fell into the world of ASP. After a while, I found Perl, though at the time I thought the name of the language was CGI, not Perl. Later on, I found PHP and thusly SQL databases.

About three summers ago, I took a two-week "Advanced VB" course that my parents forced me into, and was introduced to the WinSock control. Needless to say I was fascinated with said control. I attempted to own the world with my crappy plain text chat server, but was shut down when the kid two computers down from me wrote an application that simply sent endless ammounts of random data.
While I was in Clan CO (Camelot Online -- if you remember any bots made by BotD, he was in CO), I was asked to develop a bot to moderate the channel as CHAT bots had recently been banned from private channels. I found the (old) botdev forums, and met up with a shady figure who at the time went by the name c0ke, and started design on DoubleBot. Quickly I was abandoned, and c0ke went down a dark dark path -- I wont go any further on that subject.
Clan CO fell apart, so a member/friend and I started Clan DeathAdvocates (or DA) and the bot was renamed to DABot. The clan never really died, but people stopped showing up and I became sidetracked with another application (Hotline -- www.hotspringsinc.com) for which I wrote a VB client, another VB client (yes, two), a VB server, another VB client (yes, three), and a C server.

[off-topic]If anybody is really interested in protocols, I strongly urge you check out hotline. It doesnt deal with pre-defined formats, it uses objects. For example, to send chat, one would send the chat packet with one object that contains a string for chat, and another that contains a (word) bool for wheather it is an emote or not. Any numbers that are zero or strings that are blank can be totally omitted without breaking the protocol (well, that's the idea anyways). Aditionally, objects can be sent in any order.
The great part about this protocol is that it is so incredibly expandable (because of objects) that people have even, for example, written server and client clones that have included higher level password encryption (not that password are that important in hotline anyways). Additionally, every client version is compatable with every server version without exception, due to objects.
Once again, I strongly suggest people check this program out.[/off-topic]

While on hotline, I met a middle-aged Georgian (state not country) woman who introduced me to Digital Obsession (www.ik0ns.com) where I met LostArch last December. He had created a battle.net clan which at the time was approximately 9 months old. He convinced me to come and check it out. I hung around for a while, and he was able to rekindle the flame within that was DAbot. Naturally, it became BNU`Bot -- this is where it truely took off.

Before BNU`Bot I was much a VB newbie, and didn't know what most of my bot's code did -- most of it wasn't even written by me. I went through the entire thing and basicly blocked off areas of code that weren't mine/I didnt understand and refused to use them until I knew exactly what they did. It was a lot of work, but I certainly learned a lot, and stopped relying on dlls to do my hashing and checkrevision (although I still use bnetauth.dll for checkrevision because -- although the VB code works -- doing it in vb takes forever).

[edit] If you're interested, you can read the dated changelog here.

Now I am working on expanding my bot to the point where it is not only completely customisable in every concievable way, but making it flexible enough to manage the clan's website. As of now, the bot is nearly complete, but the website part is still only a few scripts, which you can check out here.

[Styth]

Wow. Thats a long histoy, and all this happen between the ages 10 and ?

[Adron]

I started programming in Comal when I was 11 or 12. I can't remember exactly, but I think it was lots of turtle graphics. Before that I had had some plans of trying to get to program in Hypercard, but I never actually got that, and then eventually I went on to Pascal instead.

[Styth]

Adron, so you work on Pascal now? Or C++?

[Adron]

Adorn, so you work on Pascal now? Or C++?

I programmed in Pascal for a few years, around the age of 13. I started in Compis Pascal and eventually went on to Turbo Pascal. This was some time late 80's or early 90's. Mejal might know more exactly when.

[Camel]

Wow. Thats a long histoy, and all this happen between the ages 10 and ?

17 next month...

Adorn, so you work on Pascal now? Or C++?

Adorn, eh?

[Styth]

Adorn, so you work on Pascal now? Or C++?

Adorn, eh?

Everyone makes mistakes. . . Some more than others.