Rookie Programmer Seeking Advice
 

Good evening everyone!

I am a programmer from Team 2833, the Roboscorpions, and this is my first time posting here on ChiefDelphi. I have been involved with my team for only two years and have done the best I can to help my team. Despite this being my final year as a programmer for the team, I am seeking advice on how to become a better programmer because I wish to help those who will remain in the team. Could anyone help?

Our team will be in the Alamo Regional this week and I would really appreciate communicating with any veteran programmers who will be there.

Thank you ahead of time!

Re: Rookie Programmer Seeking Advice
 

If you can, try to program some every day. You don't have to come up with a big project or anything, small problems like the ones here will work. Most importantly, don't stop learning new stuff! Try a new language, or learn to use a new library every once in a while. You'll find yourself knowing the answers to more and more questions people ask. Good luck!

Re: Rookie Programmer Seeking Advice
 

One way that I would suggest is just, in your free time, come up with some arbitrary tasks for your robot to do, or some different combinations of tasks, and just program those tasks. In my opinion, the only true way to get better at programming is constant practice and repetition. Also if you come up with a task that you are unsure how to program, explore that, the internet is your friend.

Another way to improve your programming is to find code from other teams or sources, and just go through it. Try to understand what occurs and what code causes that particular function to occur. Really there are many ways to get better at programming, so these are just my ideas.

Re: Rookie Programmer Seeking Advice
 

I'm not sure exactly what your goals are but if you like math at all I would recommend getting an algorithms textbook and coding up some of the classic data structures.

Also, if you decide that you want to try to learn more programming languages consider ones that aren't like each other. For example, if you already know Python then learning Ruby and Perl won't teach you anything. And if you already know C# then learning Java won't teach you anything. But if you only know Java or C++ then learning assembly or Ocaml would be very useful.

Re: Rookie Programmer Seeking Advice
 

Programming is something that you learn by doing. Don't just sit back and read a textbook about programming, do it! The best advice I can give is to come up with an idea for a project and then to actually implement it.

When I first started programming, I wanted to make an arcade-style video game. I implemented it in Python with the Pygame library. Later, when I joined my robotics team, I learned Java so I could program the robots. I made a calculator GUI as my intro to Java project. I'm currently learning to program in c, so, as suggested earlier in this thread, I started working on Project Euler. These problems are getting very hard to solve, and in particular coding the solutions in c makes them even harder at times.

You didn't really mention how much programming experience you have, but I think it may be better to get really good at one specific (c-lineage) language at first. Most programming languages are more or less the same, especially between c/c++, objective-c, java, and c#.

At some point in the future I really want to get into functional programming (like scheme/lisp, haskell, etc.).

Re: Rookie Programmer Seeking Advice
 

Haskell is a really good choice as a functional language to learn. Its appeal goes beyond simply being functional -- it has one of the most well-developed and flexible type systems I've ever seen, and lazy evaluation is really interesting (if weird). It lets you do crazy things like infinite lists, or even crazier things like self-referencing expressions with implied recursion: