Coders, some advice plox. - The Bear and Badger

acemuzzy

monkey wrote:

Woah now. He wants to make iOS apps here.

To be fair that wasn't the only thing he asked about in his OP...

Yossarian

It's true, I'm trying to get a feel for the field in general.

I should also say that this app idea I have is likely fairly complicated, so I'm not sure that launching straight into that will be the best move.

acemuzzy

Having discussed it with you briefly, I'd definitely suggest giving "Hello World!" a punt first :-)

.

davyK

Yep.

Start simple.

No point wrestling with learning something new AND the complexity of what you have in mind.

Pick something mind-numbingly simple that won't challenge you as your first app.

Hello World is the first app - but that is usually about learning the edit/compile/build cycle and using the toolset more than anything else.

Even if it is something that lets you enter or select two numbers and display the sum of them - anything that takes some input, does a wee bit of processing and then gives feedback to the user will do.

Yossarian

Imma clone Threes!

AJ

Serious hat on, now. If you've not coded before, something like Codecademy (http://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/javascript) might be the best place to start. Either that or Scratch.

Yossarian

I've just had a thought. My app idea could actually be broken down into several discrete parts which, individually, probably wouldn't be all that difficult, then wrapped up together into a whole.

Hmm.

AJ

That's how it's meant to work, you're off to a good start.

davyK

Have heard of Scratch. Supposed to the rather good.

acemuzzy

Aye l. MIT thing. Drag n drop coding. It wasn't clear you could hook in external APIs when I last looked, but sure it would be good to understand the building blocks etc

davyK

My prob is I'm old school. All I want is Notepad and a compiler with a CLI.

acemuzzy

Yeah you sound even more old school than me.

And I'm old school compared to all these youngsters we have at work.

Yossarian

davyK wrote:

My prob is I'm old school. All I want is Notepad and a compiler with a CLI.

No punchcards?

davyK

You laugh. They were around when I went to technical college in the mid-80s. They had a mini-computer called a PDP-8 which is a classic workhorse of the era (there are still PDP-8s running live code - they are bullet proof). Programs were written out on coding sheets and converted to decks of punched cards by typists before being fed into the machine. Never used them professionally though.

Banks have loads of code written way back. I have it on good authority some systems have core routines that still work in pre-decimal currency and there is code wrapped around it, written in the late 60s, that convert to and from decimal. There are millions of lines of undocumented legacy code out there written by people who are long dead.

monkey

It's true in the NHS as well. Early adopters of IT were healthcare providers and financial organisations. I've worked on a codebase written in the early 70s in MUMPS which you should look up if you're interested. It's nuts.

Skerret

Eiffel or bust, f u h8rs

davyK

Had an Eiffel compiler in university. A compilation of a Hello World program on a PC filled up its 40MB hard drive.

Ada was the business.

dynamiteReady

davyK wrote:

Ada was the business.

Why?

davyK

It was just really nice. Might not be that practical but as a language to study it was delightful. Like Pascal but with polish.

Think it was created by the French military so it must be of practical use.

I went to Queen's University Belfast and the lecturers had written their own Pascal compiler and called the language Pascal plus. It was a nice training language too and the compiler writing module I had to do was pretty good as it took you through its creation step by step, line by line and the text book was written by the lecturer - a guy called John Elder.

LazyGunn

I learnt programming several times, i think i'd say get a feel for what you like and put some good time in, im obviously a big Unity 3D evangelist so C# is fully my bag - can use it for iOs etc via Mono although Unity's Mono needs a serious update

Non games style, Escape's video made a nice point - you can code javascript just about anywhere, theres always something that will run it, and fuckton of examples of how to use it everywhere, i enjoyed my time with it flirting with webgl a couple of years ago

Yossarian

I know none of you guys have hands on experience with it, but what are your initial impressions of Swift?

https://developer.apple.com/swift/

hylian_elf

davyK wrote:

My prob is I'm old school. All I want is Notepad and a compiler with a CLI.

Hah, reminds me of uni days when that's all we had. Can't remember the name of the software (free) we all were using for our Java or whatever code, but it's been mentioned on the forum before. Sure I'll know the name when I see it.

dynamiteReady

Yossarian wrote:

I know none of you guys have hands on experience with it, but what are your initial impressions of Swift? https://developer.apple.com/swift/

It's a good language with some interesting features, but fuck learning a 'tie-in' language. You'd be better off learning one of the new Java based languages... Or Python, upon which Swift borrows an awful lot.

@Elf

Wot? Netbeans, or Eclipse?

Yossarian

I am leaning towards learning to develop apps ATM. I have this one app idea already, and me and my brother have been kicking around an idea for a game which has potential and could work quite nicely on iOS. He's an animator, I also like to dabble in music, if I learn to code then we do have all of the bases covered in regards to putting a game together. The only issue for me with attempting to learn Swift at the moment is that there's very little in the way of resources available for it. Or very little for a complete noob at least. I'm considering getting my feet wet with some web-based stuff to start with and waiting for more details to come along.

Or maybe I start with Python and use that as a way to learn Swift?

Yossarian

I'm more generally thinking that if I do want to try to do build apps, Swift may be the easiest way into it.

AJ

If you learn to program one language, it's much, much easier to pick up another. It's more about concepts than the actual syntax and vocabulary. For example, I've never really used them but threw together simplistic Java and Objective C apps within an hour when I had a go. Seriously, if you've not coded before, JavaScript (for all its faults) is a really good place to start since there's so many resources, every device can already run it and you can type stuff directly into the browser's console to try, as well as the interactive sites I've mentioned. As a bonus, you can put together apps that seem almost native for iOS.

AJ

Hell, as well as being able to set up web apps to appear native on iOS, there's things that let you code in JavaScript and convert it to native apps for the major platforms (up to a certain level of complexity, anyway).

Yossarian

JavaScript's one of the three major languages for building websites (along with HTML and CSS) right? Or am I confusing it with Java?

The ability to build a web page would be a useful skill.

AJ

Yeah, that's right. Well, client side, anyway. Technically, HTML and CSS aren't languages but simply markup, so they should be much quicker to learn the basics.

Yossarian

Client side being front facing? As in, what I see when I visit a website as opposed to the back end stuff?

And what's the difference between a language and a markup?

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