My turn.
My background in computers is a bit related to my family, my old man started his interests in computers as a mathematician on a COMMODORE 64, he went for a degree in ITC engineering as 'analyst-programmer' to pursue his math research and computation algorithms.
I still remember the weird characters that showed up, a spade, a diamond etc.. as i slammed random keys on the keyboard as a 6 year old kid does on keyboards, especially when thy belong to adults.
FatherB then told me that those characters were "machine talk", a word that i have never forgotten. When the first dialup-systems and modems were available for Belgian citizens, i was still a kid and even more amazed by listening to the 'machine talk' when i picked up the phone that was 'dialing-in'. I kept asking *Why* and as a kid i didn't understand the answers like , "computation", "compilation" and "assembly", i thought computers had a 'life & language' of their own.
*It is alive!*
To keep me busy, fatherB programmed a quick&dirty calculator in PASCAL language that did addition only and asked me to make a quick&dirty program in that same PASCAL that would do the substraction and later on : multiplication, division and modulus, all based on the guidelines of his first snippet of code. I was 10 or 11 at that time i think and i remember being very frustrated about the 'modulus' :)
(Tim Berners Lee had at that time published the WorldWideWeb RFC that we all now call "Internet": TCP over IP, in 1982)
My adolescence was computerless until i got interested in MIDI and computer-wise sound manipulations of all kinds. At the same time, on highschool, since i opted for science and maths, we had a compulsatory module in informatics. So, we had programming classes in PASCAL.
Friends of mine, in others schools had programming classes in BASIC.
10:
11:
The fight begun. I hated BASIC in favor of PASCAL somehow. Too much 'monkey business' in comparision. A bit like what a Java programmer would say now to a C-family developer.
Computers where an everyday work and life tool when i was ready for the employment market, looking for a job with some first canditate degrees in philosophy and communication scieces and a graduation in psychology. The first jobs i had were all accountancy related, that is to say : Excell & Access, Oracle, Delphi and so... SQL.
From than on, as a kid who thought that computers of all kind (from terminals, consoles to toshiba laptops and cellphones) had a "language of their own" called "machine language" in my juvenile fantasy, i wanted to know all the dialects, variants, sematics, exceptions, clauses etc.. So i did all that 'searching' which is nowadays called 'reverse-engineering' in my office at work in late afterhours.
Note : i am far, far far away from an expert, i remain an enthousiast because i loke "Machine Talk" !).
It is when i had a job in a telecom company related to WorldCom MCI that i started to take classes.
From that period on, i still learn, day by day.
Actual skills:
- ahum .. i know how to make a "HelloWorld" in many languages, even esoteric languages like
Ook! :-)
- generically : what all of us know here : xHTML (XML), SQL, PHPx,ASP.NET(give an F for this one), XSL & CSS, other acronymic variants of the same kind.
-I am a n000000b, in Java.
-PERL is my biggest friend and i'd like to win the Perlmongers' contest one day.
-C,C++ and C# (when it is ISO compliant, so not always on any Win32 API)
Plans :
- I'd like to write a browser one day and i'd like to define a DTD for stringed music instruments.
Credits :
I like this forum because it is not hostile to n00bs (so far ;-)