What did you suck at or hate?

Sparks wrote: »

Here's the thing. Mobile and Web programming are loud areas of our industry. But loud doesn't mean big. If you counted up everyone working at the bleeding edge of mobile in startups and all the rest of the rock star programmers, and then you counted up everyone working in the finance sector, in embedded programming, in application or OS programming, all the folks doing the unsexy work that keeps the world ticking over and who never feature in the blogs... well, that second number would be a lot higher than the first.


They're important for every language. Some languages just try harder to hide them away from the programmer than others.

ah I see what you mean about the pointers. I vaguely remember been a while since I studied programming.

Ya I see now where you going with the mobile programming that the OS and other types of programming are more in need.

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

Sparks wrote: »

They're important for every language. Some languages just try harder to hide them away from the programmer than others.

Which for those languages is very very important, pointers should not be used directly unless they need to be hence a lot of languages not exposing them directly.

And you should never use goto either...
...except where you should.

ie. Not using pointers directly isn't an absolute good. Same as with almost all of our constructs.

Back when I started hacking code together, you didn't get whole frameworks for generics, collections, iterators etc., so if you wanted a variable length list of something and couldn't (or shouldn't) use an array, you'd have to implement a linked list. A lot of stuff I hacked around with in those days was in Turbo Pascal, and the pointer syntax was pretty simple.

Type TMyRecord = Record; { forward declaration }
Type pMyRecord = ^TMyRecord; { pointer typed to TMyRecord }
Type TMyRecord = Record
 Data : String; 
 Next : pMyRecord; 
end;

var
    aHead : pMyRecord
    aTmp : pMyRecord
    aNew : pMyRecord

...

aNew:=New(pMyRecord);

...

aTmp:=aHead;
if Assigned(aTmp) do
 begin
  While (Assigned(aTmp^.Next)) do
   aTmp:=aTmp^.Next;
  aTmp^.Next = aNew;
 end
else
 aHead:=aNew;

I really hate MI (management information) type database work, big queries pulling data from everywhere and anywhere, never feel too confident doing that sort of stuff. Hate doing formal database diagrams too - always end up more confused than if I'd just designed the tables on paper.

I also tend to get dumped with old code maintenance a lot, and can generally live with poor code, it's poor architecture that drives me mad, especially when you have to do something "against the grain". Had fun yesterday tracking down an uninstantiated object because as it turns out a particular class was instantiated twice, and when I was cloning it I was getting the first useless/incomplete copy. GC has a lot to answer for...

I've also been dumped with some C and C++ (Windows API) based stuff. It's years since I've done any of it and even at that don't think I was too great then, so it's a struggle now.

Not too great at maths either, although I've never in the last ~20 years come across something mathematically I couldn't (eventually) do, but have been turned down for a couple of jobs because of it - which in retrospect wasn't necessarily a bad thing...

D.

doovdela wrote: »

What's GC?

Garbage Collection. Given the class was instantiated twice, the first one that was never used would have been garbage collected when it was replaced by the second instantiation, so while it's not a memory leak as per a non-GC language, it's still wasteful and a poor design... IMO.

Neither am I but I find numerical tests can help improve you in this area when going for jobs where Maths be a requirement in some IT jobs. Depends I guess. Its more logical maths than actual arithmetic maths be a requirement really for the majority of IT jobs.

My first time in college many many years ago the statistical stuff just completely melted me brain - I don't think I've ever got over it. Did a module recently on boolean math proofs etc., and really really enjoyed it - not like with like but perhaps being a (fair) bit older now I was more open to paying attention!!?

D.