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Finally, a reason to hate VB6.
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Edsger W. Dijkstra[^] said it first:
Quote: is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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I taught myself GW Basic in 1985. It was my first language. I then got exposed to dBaseIII - which I could just NOT wrap my mind around. The whole concept of Procedures was so foreign coming from a line number driven environment. I think that even today, 30 years later, I'm still a little scarred by GW Basic.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is.
Everything makes sense in someone's mind.
Ya can't fix stupid.
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that's why I'm slow as a turtle!
I'd rather be phishing!
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Technically, my first language was the numeric keyboard encoding on the HP25C, capable of 49 instruction memory. I learned a lot about code optimization. 
I then moved up to the HP67, which I think offered 200 instruction memory, then the HP41C.
Somewhere in the middle I was doing BASIC programming on a teletype on a PDP-11, where I finally wrapped my head around the idea that when you tell the computer a = 5 and later say print a+1, there's some memory somewhere that contains 5, a reference somewhere that a refers to that memory cell. That actually took a while.
When I progressed to the Commodore PET, the world opened up to hardware, registers, and 6502 assembly language. Not to mention early concepts of a BIOS.
Doing a lot of assembly programming kept teaching me skills like code optimization, DRY principles way before the acronym was invented, good documentation and variable / entry point naming skills, and most certainly, good debugging skills.
I also got introduced to parallel processing in a Pascal-like language called SAIL, which was sort of a mind-bender because line numbers and goto / jmp (in assembly) disappeared. I really had no concept of a stack yet at that point, and when, in a summer class I took at Stanford by a guy that would pick his zit scabs and eat them (I kid you not, it was  and his classes were being video-taped!) I simply could not wrap my head around recursion, stack-based variables, and ended up spending my time in front of computer playing Star Trek instead of writing the quicksort algorithm. Heck, I didn't even know what question I should be asking, my programming brain was so oriented around linear-sequence programming. I'm not sure I finally grokked the concept of a stack vs. a heap until years later.
My introduction to C was one of "run away". All those ridiculous symbols and weird behaviors, like i++ vs. ++i. Really? Who invented this horribly confusing language to write and read? Pascal was my buddy by then, courtesy of Borland and $99 Turbo Pascal.
So I basically skipped C, but really like C++. It made sense -- classes, encapsulation, polymorphism. But I got "base class" wrong. It's a BASE class right? So like the base of a pyramid, it's at the bottom of the derivation hierarchy, right??? I wrote a whole app that way. Templates were amazing, they also made so much sense.
In many ways, C++ very much refined my ideas of separating code into isolated blocks of code. Still, I found that there was too much inter-dependency between classes. Re-use was a myth, not a reality. Tight coupling of code made the code monolithic. It was only by careful planning and using higher level architectures, like a publisher-subscriber pattern, that I was able begin to disentangle the monolithic nature of applications. Which also lead me down the path of loading DLL's dynamically at runtime and separating out declarative aspects of the code from imperative ones. XML didn't really exist, so I wrote my own XAML-like syntax for rendering UI's with MFC.
Other things became apparent too - the tight coupling of the data access layer (and embedded SQL statements) that were rampant at that time. Again, a custom scripting language to separate out the SQL statements from the app had a direct impact on how quickly code could be changed to deal with changing / new requirements. Everyone's jaw would drop when I could run a C++ app, change some declarative markup and SQL, and have new functionality, without compiling a line of code (heck, without even exiting the application.)
About that time, the Design Patterns book hit the streets and everyone was yammering about DP's, and I thought, wow, this is so old hat!
And also about that time, I read Vital Dust[^], which changed how I thought about programming forever. It's quite fascinating that a book about the roots of life changed my thinking about programming - something no programming book had (and has) ever done. Around that time, I discovered Code Project (was using a 64K ISDN modem at the time) and so, on May 26 2002, I took my ideas from Vital Dust and the experiences I had gained and wrote my first article, Organic Programming Environment[^]. (Years later, the concept was revisited again with HOPE[^] originally posted exactly (-1 day) 12 years later!)
And then C# appeared. The rest was history. C# has so greatly influenced my programming and thinking style that I cringe whenever I have to use another language (which usually consists nowadays of Python and Javascript.) And it continues to do so, with functional aspects, LINQ, etc.
And certainly, my history of compiled, strong typed languages has bent my thinking, such that script, duck-typed languages are, to be frank, a joke (and a bad one at that) in my opinion.
So I continue on the path of further refining the ideas of decoupling code and creating modular data-driven rather than imperative workflow-driven applications, and where concepts like dependency injection are, in my opinion, totally the wrong direction to go, (I can't believe people still use DI), and to the ire of the people that look at my code and the supporting framework, who don't get it and never will get it.
So over the last 30 years, my exposure to a certain path of languages and a certain path of problems has led me to a particularly lonely corner of the programming universe! But thank God for Code Project, where I you can at least peek under the bed to see what monsters lurk in the bedroom of my programming mind.
Marc
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Nice explanation
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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What an enjoyable, and educational, tour of your journey as a programmer !
I'm still very influenced by my experience with LISP and PostScript, both of which, as you know, are interpreted, and allow easy transformation of text to code, and code to text (REPL). Few people today understand that PostScript was really a kind of binding of a framework that owed much to LISP to a graphics engine significantly more powerful than either of the graphics engines/libraries (QuickDraw, GDI) in the two dominant computer platforms / OS's.
I really appreciated the ease with which PostScript allowed one to save, or restore, the complete 'graphic state' in effect at any given moment ... to implement a kind of context-switching inheritance-model by having a Dictionary Stack, where any name-lookup started in the topmost Dictionary in the stack, and searched down, evaluating the first 'hit.'
I remember a meeting where John Warnock (when I was at Adobe) talked to all of us engineers in the app division (at that time PhotoShop, Illustrator, newly acquired AfterEffects), describing how productive he and other developers/researchers at PARC had been using SAIL, SmallTalk, and other in-house dev tools.
That was during the period of time when the team porting PhotoShop to Windows had decided the only way to do it was to implement the MacApp FrameWork itself, and then write/port the code to that. This was considered 'lunacy' by other engineers who predicted they'd end up having to re-write it from scratch ... and I am sure it has been re-written many times as it evolved into PS CS/CC.
For me, C Sharp is the ultimate, and I am a 'true believer' in strong-typing. I believe that one reason I like C-Sharp so much is, of course, its vibrant, massive, infrastructure of adopters, users, devs, resources like CP and StackOverflow, very large numbers of quality blogs from within MS as well as out, and, the educational efforts, and technical writing, of individuals I consider gurus-of-gurus, like Jon Skeet, Eric Lippert, Marc Gravell, Pete O'Hanlon, Marc Clifton, Sacha Barber, and many others.
Of course, it's always nice to play 'whatif:' what if MS had put its dev assets to work on an improved Windows Forms; with a retained-mode 2-d graphics engine made usable ... so that an app like Marc's FlowShape could be done relatively easy... instead of doing the whole dance with WPF, Metro, etc.
Anyway, for me, it's great to be alive and able to use C-Sharp ... even if the latest MS OS is going through 'teeting pains.' !
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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I knew a prof at the University of Waterloo who said Basic, a language he taught, "cause irreparable brain damage".
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
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Soviet scientists tried for decades to network their nation. What stalemated them is now fracturing the global internet. If only they had Al Gore...
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Australian engineers have created a new quantum bit which remains in a stable superposition for 10 times longer than previously achieved, dramatically expanding the time during which calculations could be performed in a future silicon quantum computer. 2.4ms! Victory is ours!
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It was really a 1, 2, 3, & 4 fold boost all at the same time.
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The JS Foundation was designed to foster JavaScript applications and server-side projects by providing best practices and policies. Does this mean we have to have a Year of JavaScript now?
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Year of JavaScript
C:\src\local\wtf> npm install year --save
wtf@1.0.0 C:\src\local\wtf
+-- systemjs@0.19.39
`-- year@0.2.1
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It's extremely responsive without overly expensive hardware. It has a decent browser and batteries have a good duration even on smaller and cheaper phonesets.
For a consumer who wants to use all the available apps for registering, flight bookings, payments, fun, even farsebook... it is useless. Apps are updated every 6-12 months while the other platforms have already mvoed forward; GMail and Google Maps are unavailable (the latter is unavailable even through the browser) and Bing Maps is as accurate as the Bing search engine (I was at Greenwhich and it showed me in the very middle of the Thames).
It's half baked and it was never pushed on the market nor advertised properly, so it fell in the self-repeating cycle of no apps -> no users -> no apps (because it's not economically worthy) -> no users...
DURA LEX, SED LEX
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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Interesting notes on WinPhone.
I tell you though as new iOS dev who is using an ipad mini (or any ios device) for the first time, there are a lot of gaps in UX from apple iOS too. And this new Sierra feature of having to actually click the hardware button to unlock the thing. It's odd.
All the device OSes are flawed.  I like Android best though.
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Almost 70 percent of companies are likely to phase out passwords within five years, the survey showed Then the hackers won't have anything to steal! Brilliant!
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Without a password you'd need another kind of token that will prove who you are. That means that the problem will persist.
So, the survey actually says that 70% of companies rather blame the existence of the password than take a serious look at their own security. It would be nice if those companies were publicly listed.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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You are correct, and this is one my peeves.
I use a password manager and the strongest passwords. Sometimes 128 characters.
The problem is, more and more businesses are preventing you from using strong passwords. They reject them. Especially banks and credit cards.
And to make it worse, they deliberately put code into their signon page to prevent pasting in a password. This makes it inconvenient to use strong passwords, because now you have to manually type them, so people just give up and use weak passwords.
IDIOTS!!!!!
I have one total moron credit card that EVERY SINGLE TIME I login I have to tell it who my first friend was, the name of my dog, who's on first.
That account will be cancelled soon. They just don't get it.
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True. I should pick the next cat-name from the random GUID generator 
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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I have a GUIDO generator if you need one.
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A company trying to create a market by buying a survey, I suppose I can't blame 'em.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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C++/WinRT is a standard C++ language projection for the Windows Runtime implemented solely in header files. "Where's your head at, you don't make it easy on yourself"
Yeah, I got nothing.
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This is actually pretty good, but too little, too late, IMHO. They should have done this initially instead of the C++/CX debacle.
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