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Unread 06-04-2010, 16:47
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

My avatar is a Commodore PET 4032. 40 character wide screen... 32 kB of RAM. Made in Canada! You could get a floppy drive for them... but they cost a fortune. Mostly our programs were saved and loaded from audio cassette tapes. Type in "load", press "play" and wait five or ten minutes.

They cost a fair bit back in the '70's but our local high school had one and my Dad, a teacher there, could take turns taking it home on the weekend to learn how to use it. I'm not sure how many hours I spent down in the basement with a manual and computer magazines figuring out how to write code in BASIC.

There weren't many people around to teach programming, at least in northern BC, in those days, and there certainly was no internet to go to for advice.

But it was a fabulous time to learn programming because the expectations were so low. If you could make a COMPUTER do SOMETHING... ANYTHING... it was considered pretty impressive. If you could make it do what you wanted it to do, well... that was even better.

When Zork and Space Invaders were high tech, it wasn't too hard for one person, working alone in their basement, to come up with an impressive game or application.

That's why I like teaching programming using robots and microcontrollers. Most people have no preconceptions of what a robot or microcontroller should be able to do... so programming a $2.00 PIC to receive an IR remote control signal and drive a mini sumo robot is seen as "impressive", even though it is a reasonably simple task.

But regardless of the platform or language, there is no substitute for hours upon hours of creating, troubleshooting, modifying and debugging your own code.

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Unread 06-04-2010, 17:07
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

http://www.learncpp.com/
and constantly looking up documentation. My favorite learning technique is kind of... brute force, I set out to do something I don't know and then consult the documentation for how to do it. Even my very first "programming" language, TI-84 BASIC, I learned from the calculator documentation and some practice. Of course you also need a certain degree of patience to do this.

I had a partner last year, both of us knew no LabVIEW and had no one to teach us, and we had to set out to program a bot using it. The other guy decided that since we didn't know anything, we couldn't hope to do anything. What did I do? Go straight into the VI and try to figure out what everything does, referring to documentation along the way. I learned a lot this way and we had a robot working by ship date (nothing fancy, just basic teleop and straight line autonomous - but better than nothing). The other guy gave up, mostly sat there and watched, and quit the team afterward.

(Despiteless I was still much more confortable with C++ so I had us switch this year.)
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Last edited by Al3+ : 06-04-2010 at 17:11.
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Unread 06-04-2010, 17:09
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

My first year with 339, I went into build season with virtually no programming experience - just a tiny bit of experimentation with VB. The first time I walked into a meeting, the programming mentor intercepted me and asked, "programming and electronics?" I said yeah, that sounds interesting, and ended up on the programming team. That season, I didn't do much coding at all. In fact, I didn't write anything myself; just added debug statements and changed constants in others' code. I recommended a few algorithms for autonomous, but other members and mentors took care of the actual implementation because I didn't have the knowledge to do it myself. That year, I picked up some of the general concepts of programming but didn't fully understand everything I was doing; this lead to, for example, me being confused about the difference between preprocessor macros and global variables.

The next year, my second in FIRST, I was more capable. Halfway through that build season, I wrote my first complete function - in Notepad, no less - an algorithm that used a gyro sensor to keep the robot moving forward along a straight path. It didn't work at all initially, but I kept tweaking it and working on it (without mentor assistance), and eventually made it work so well, we failed to notice when one of our CIMs burnt out because the software corrected for it perfectly.

That Summer was the last one before we switched to the new control system, and my mentor wanted us to prepare for the change, so I learned C++ and we discussed how we would design the program once the new control system became available. This is where I really made the jump to a self-teaching programmer. I loved the concept of object-oriented programming and became an expert in C++, to the point that my mentor wanted me to "dumb down" my code so that new students could better understand it. I was using templates, multiple inheritance, functors, and who knows what else. He also explained to me how compilers and programming in general work, so I began to understand the purpose of the constructs I was dealing with. We even went into optimization for a bit.

In 2009, my senior year with 339, I wrote the majority of the robot code from scratch. Looking back, it's amazing how quickly I jumped from not knowing anything about programming to being a self-motivated expert in the subject.
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Unread 06-04-2010, 17:16
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

about 4 hours of looking at different vis in labview. majorly tired after that.
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Unread 06-04-2010, 17:48
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

Quite honestly, i learned coding through studying open source programs and reading half of a c manual
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Unread 06-04-2010, 17:54
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

Good question, i took a basic CS class in our school, however, i mainly taught robotics stuff myself. I was pretty successful, until I deployed my first code, then i realized that it is a lot harder then i expected. If i ever had any q's, i went to this forum for help... so yeah, that is how i learned.
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Unread 06-04-2010, 17:55
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

TI-83+
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Unread 06-04-2010, 20:01
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

I'm pretty much a self-taught programmer. My main experiments with C were from the RCX and NXT lego bricks, through NQC and NXC. I learned most of the basic concepts from dissecting the source code of programs, and once I got around to reading programming books I didn't learn much other than a few C++ concepts (try blocks mainly). After I learned C++ most other languages came naturally to me, the only thing that confused me with other languages were the APIs (and that stupid foreach statement in PHP). I picked up LabVIEW a bit for writing our dashboard, and found it fairly easy to understand, but all of the mysterious symbols for the basic functions drove me away from it a bit.
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Unread 06-04-2010, 20:26
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

I first learned to program from BASIC. I was bored with it in about an hour. Then I learned about Microsoft VisualBasic. I lucked out since Microsoft just recently (then) invested quite a bit of money to commission a 12-video series to kick start people to learn VisualBasic from scratch (learning about concepts like variables or GUI) to building your own RSS Feed Reader. I followed that night and day intensely for a while. Then I got the hang of it. Got good enough to build a VisualBasic program to display all the running processes in a list and interact with a local database.

Then I "picked up" (or honestly, pirate) FlashMX, then I witnessed the Macromedia to Adobe transition. I was pretty big in flash community forum started by an Adobe employee (community evangelist). But those days are over. I don't pirate Flash (just making sure) nor do I work with Flash, but now that there are open source alternatives, I might toy around with that (more compiler-like than an IDE).

After that, I was basically on my own. Once I knew "how things worked" in a simple scale, I was able to bridge that in to more deeper and advanced concepts and knowledge.

Now what I like doing is developing Mac & iPhone apps. I intern every summer for an iPhone app consultancy.

I must say I was pretty lucky that I had a pretty powerful computer at the time, a lot of free time on my hands (5th~6th grade), and that video series that Microsoft had given for free. Now it's hard to find that video series, but I think it's great.

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  #25   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 06-04-2010, 20:26
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

I had a Visual Basic Class in high school and played around with my graphing calculator a bit. The math teacher was amazed when I wrote a quadratic formula solver He was a cool one that realized I wasn't cheating.

I picked up how to program pretty easily, and when I started college I had classes that taught me about object-oriented programming. Last year I had a class on design patterns and it was probably my favorite class yet.

I learned all my FRC stuff from other mentors on the team (We used C, now C++). How to program for embedded, etc. I actually found it more interesting to work under the constraints of the old IFI control system.

I love programming because I am super lazy when it comes to tedious tasks (like repeatedly solving the quadratic formula). If it's something a computer can do.... why not?

(I'm in school for Software Engineering)

Last edited by BigJ : 06-04-2010 at 20:29.
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Unread 06-04-2010, 21:02
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

I started in 7th grade when we learned how to program a CNC machine.
I was interested in Game Programming, so I got a few books on that (Big Mistake, the book was on a form of basic - should have tried learning a more standard language first.)

Fast forward to High School - one of the mentors took me through C programming with the edu robot (earliest form of VEX, I believe teams were given kits of these when they switched over).

Also, 3 years of Java in high school, a semester of C and Matlab in college.



I haven't "mastered" labview yet, however I'm pretty confident if I needed to get something done in it I could hack my way through (I've been given tutorials from another mentor on our team). I'd much rather give the problems than do them
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Unread 07-04-2010, 00:16
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

My parents got a computer when I was 8. My dad had a rule that I could only use the computer for an hour a day, unless I was programming. Because of that, I got a lot of books from the library and played with BASIC and Pascal. I tried to learn C at that point also, but it was too complicated for me.

As for LabVIEW, I started with the Learn LabVIEW in 6 hours online course. From there I started doing Project Euler problems using LabVIEW. Since then, everything I've done is FIRST related, first implementing our 2008 code on the cRIO with LabVIEW, and now the 2009 and 2010 robots. Helping teams at regionals is a great way to get exposed to a lot more stuff.
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Unread 07-04-2010, 01:09
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

I got interested in programming in about 6th grade. I became fairly knowledgeable of C-like languages.

Dowload a Free OS, and just start tinkering. If you don't destabilize your system a few times while starting out, you aren't tinkering enough. For this reason, I feel very strongly that anyone interested in computers should get their own computer -not a family computer- that is entirely their's, so that they break it, 1) no one will eat their head off 2) they can _learn_ while taking their time to fix it, instead of hurrying up & taking it somewhere, because others depend on it. Go into it with the mindset that you have something to contribute, find something that doesn't work how you like, and [try to] fix it. See http://catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

The summer between 8th grade and Fresman year I decided to sit down for a few days and teach properly learn C. A lot of reading the gLibC manual and cprogramming.com (although, cprogramming.com follows the track of teaching C++ first, I didn't do this, nor recommend using this. I think that it is very hard to _fully_ understand Object Oriented if you have never seen anything without it.)

Last year I learned G (LabVIEW is actually just the program for `writing' the G language) just by tinkering with it for FRC, because one of our mentors insisted we use it, and our programming team leader went with it. Bad decision. I feel that G could be a good language, but that LabVIEW is a horrible program, and that the file format used to store G could use some work. (Also, it required me to dig out the Vista license that came with my lappy to put Windows on the thing. Vista gives any other program a bad first impression)

At some point I picked up C++ to fix a segfault in an app. Several thousand lines of code, no comments; I got a decent understanding (though a lot of it was masked by Qt). I did re-factor it a bit, but the bare changes to fix the problem are disappointingly short.

Earlier this year I taught myself Java in a weekend for a coding competition. (Less impressive when you consider I already knew C, C++, PHP, and others). This came in handy when we ended up using Java this year. I teach the AP Comp Sci students on the stuff about Java, having never taken the course; self-motivation will teach you betting than any class ever will. (I'm taking the class next year, I would go ahead and take the AP test now, if it weren't so expensive)

Last edited by LukeS : 07-04-2010 at 01:14.
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Unread 07-04-2010, 02:26
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

My programming buddy and I attended a very basic workshop on LabVIEW for high school students held at a university. It mostly just went over generally how the program worked, what the front panel and the block diagram were. So basically, we both learned how to program with LabVIEW on our own last season, and it wasn't all that difficult. We figured out the function of each subVI thanks to the help function Now we love programming in LabVIEW and will never go back to C (not that we knew that much C to start with).
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Unread 07-04-2010, 19:37
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Re: How Did You Learn How To Program?

The whole idea just interested me so one summer I went out and picked up a c++ book and taught myself. Easily one of the most useful things I've ever learned. As for LabVIEW, it was a whole lot of trial and error. At first I would make things and plug them in but as I kept using more and more I got to actually understand the language and how things work. Probably the hardest part was getting adjusted to the way it executes, coming from a background programming that executes sequentially
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