Creating programs
In these pages I want to share some of the knowledge I've acquired over the years whilst pottering about in the world of programming. Believe it or not I learnt and wrote my first program in school - with punchcards!
Yes punchcards - if you don't know what these are then find some old films to watch. Basically you take a piece of card and punch holes in it. Each column on the card gets a combination of holes which can represent, for instance, a letter. So we punched holes in the columns to spell out
10 LET A = 10
20 LET B = 20
30 LET C = A + B
40 PRINT A AND "+" AND B AND "=" AND C
or something like that anyway. These got collected by the teacher and sent to our local area 'computer' where someone fed them in and posted back the results. So, in a mere two weeks, we were able to clutch the results of our program to our chests, sobbing quietly as what we got back was 'Syntax error at line 40' and we realised we had mistakenly punched
40 PRING A AND "+" AND B AND "=" AND C
Things have moved on considerably since those days. I went through the joys of a Commodore PET at school, where we could program directly in BASIC, and then had the joy of my first home computer - a ZX81 (which came as a kit which I put together with a soldering iron - that's another story). Then onto the BBC micro - Colour! I wrote a few fun programs on that - still using BASIC.
Then we moved to PC's and for a while I found the amateur programmer left out a bit... Then discovered that actually Excel could be programmed with Visual Basic (or a form of it anyway). This led me into using Excel forms and writing more full blown programs. Even moving through to accessing the Windows API's and eventually writing a 3D simulation in which you could watch a shape rotating, with a moving background and hidden line elimination..
Then I found Microsoft had released an 'Express' edition of Visual Studio - aimed at people like me...
So I've been able to move on, through VB.NET to C# and playing around with DirectX (now sadly no longer supported directly in managed code, but there are libraries out there)
So - here's one of my favourite programs which I wrote in 2013 using VB.NET - it's a game called Pentominoes (Google it). All you have to do is fit all the tiles in the given area... This download will only work on a PC - I might write an app for it one day...
Anyway, try the game, I guarantee you will find yourself in this situation more often than not.
