seems you made yourself a notorious reputation among some students lol..

during my time at uom, PL is one of the most interesting module i’ve done.. another nice thing about the module was that the paper was entirely set about the labworks so basically learning something by heart didn’t work

PL is a quite heavy module for students but am sure you’ll come up with something to make the class interesting as usual..all the best for next semester..

Don’t worry about starting late in the 2000′s You are going to be a great programmer because you LIKE programming. Thanks for mentioning Erlang. It a fantastic language: easy to use and incredibly powerful especially for doing concurrency.

Those who DO NOT LIKE programming, of course, will have (or are having) a tough time doing CS. And this is perfectly as expected. In fact, in many universities, they would not have passed the first semester and would have moved to something else. Which unfortunately does not happen here in Mauritius.

This year I’m teaching Programming Languages for the first time and some (bad) students are already telling their friends that they are going to fail BEFORE actually having followed one lecture with me! Those (bad) students with such a pathetic mentality and fright of programming should never have chosen CS in the first place…

Sometimes. I wish I could have the experience of people of that era, the hardship you people undergo to learn to program..comment dir learning the hard way to have fun with a game…maybe writing the game itself is something more fun that actually playing the game, which nowadays would be a silly one(that was my case for my gfx assignment).

Well about me, I did not had a pc when I was 13,during college time, I only did computing studies up to form 3, no experience about programming,we(i am refering to me) were just taught how to use a word processor, things like thats as you would have already guessed was boring.Infact, thought having supposedly learn computer for three year at college, I still did not know to use a computer(compared to the way i do now),maybe that was one of the major reason why i did not do computing in Sc or Hsc, moreover my parent could not afford to buy me a pc for me to “play around” and neither did any of my near family had a pc….so basically there’s would have no possibilty for me to learn programming( I wonder if ever I even knew about the word.

I’ve got my first pc about five years ago(this november will make it five),hein actually it was bought for my brother in order for him to do his assigments(I was in lower Six at that time). It was now the time for me where I could really say that i know how to use a pc.Needless to say, like you wanted to play game, I too wanted to play game
(mo osi mo ti zenfan) but the only difference betwwen your era and mine is that lot of games were easily and cheaply available, so there was no need for me to learn to program as pastime.

I was introduced to programming only at the university and as most of you already know, C++ is my first programming language(maybe why sometimes I prefer C++ to do some of my assignment
especially the OR ones…thought sometime I wonder if I know how to program)…along came java,C,VB(if we call that a language),ruby,etc…and now erlang.

Oops, I hope I have not been too much out of subject(that was just the way i see things).From your time and now, lots of thing have changed.You learn to program so as to play games but now lots and lots of game are easily availble, so why would any learn to program to play game.Moreover, with the internet(where lots of youngster spending their time on communities site like facebook among others) and mutimedia facilities available, I don’t see any normal human being who would strive to learn the hard way to make a simple and silly game for fun…unless you are learning these stuffs for your academics..

Who now cares how the watch work as long as it gives us time unless you are a watchmaker..
this is what technology for…to ease the life of common people(I mean the non-scientist folk)…to save them from learing the hard way..

Hope have not been too much out of subject

I lent it to a friend who was doing video editing (or, more precisely, video titling) around 10 years ago and that friend never gave it back to me.

I must ask him

Actually, it’s quite possible to learn programming by trial-and-error. I did the same with BASIC, only I referred to some sample programs that were on the MS-DOS discs.

Talking about MS-DOS, when I got my first computer, there were the MS-DOS disc and the BASIC disc. I kept wondering why the manual instructed not to format the MS-DOS disc (while at the same time stating that new discs should be formatted) until curiosity took over and did just that. Gee, the trouble that I had to go through to get another MS-DOS disc — not many people had computers at that time, mind you.

–Eddy

You really had to be a nerd spend hours in front a low-resolution screen, coding hundreds of lines, just to have that little sprite walking across your screen!! Or even use a soldering iron to build your own data cables from pinouts…

The Amiga 500 was one hell of a machine!! Superb graphics and powerful 32-bit processor and DSPs…I still remember those Trackers and Demos. Too bad Commodore dropped the ball. The OS was soooo far ahead…I doubt they will ever make a comeback, even with their upcoming OS5.

The Atari ST, on the other hand, was “The Mac for the poor”…I had so many great applications. I wanted to have one just because it had integrated MIDI ports and could run Pro-24!