Programming Lesson 2 Out

As promised, here is the second lesson in the series. The first lesson was all about taking the first baby steps, such as what a program is and what functions are for. Now we take a look at comments, a little bit about dealing with errors, and 10,000 foot view of how a compiler builds a program. Enjoy! Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 2.

Branching Out

Sometimes I have plenty of useful stuff to say that really isn't appropriate for this particular blog, so I spawned a second blog, DarkWyrm Unabridged. There's even something to read over there now, too. If you ever wanted to know more about me personally, that would be the place to do it. It still needs some work on making look like a regular blog (as opposed to the cookie cutter variety), but it's a start.

Calling All Haiku Developer Wannabes

Have you ever wanted to learn to program for Haiku (or something else) but never had the money or the chance? Has something else gotten in the way? Even though I still don't have any real motivation to work on Paladin or write other code, right now I have plenty of motivation for writing about code.

I'm going to be publishing online programming lessons whenever I have some time. Usually this will be about one per week, but may happen more or less often on occasion, depending on how my spare time runs. These lessons will be available in PDF form under a Creative Commons license that will give me some options should I ever want to publish them in dead tree format.

Considering that I write fairly well and I've been teaching for more than 10 years now, this is quite an opportunity for someone who wants to learn to code. To kick things off, here's the first one. Learning to Program With Haiku, Lesson 1.

Do BeOS and Zeta Matter Any More?

I just got to thinking the other day (yeah, nasty habit, I know) and I've started to wonder if R5 and Zeta really make a difference any more. BeOS R5, patched or otherwise, is just shy of 10 years old. In the land of Redmond, that's the difference between Windows 98SE and 7. Ouch. Hardware that will run it is increasingly hard-to-find, as well -- unless you run it on a recycled machine, at which point you run into hardware reliability problems at some point.

Although it's only been 2 years since the final release of Zeta, it's also been declared illegal via piracy, so current users are on shaky legal ground at best when using it. It also has a number of compatibility problems with R5 and Haiku, as well. Hardware support has been kind of funny in my experience -- some machines will run it and others not at all. There isn't any binary compatibility with Haiku with anything compiled on Zeta, either, which adds hassle to developers.

Although Haiku has made great strides, it is still buggy, and unless it sees a serious influx of developers in the near future, it will be for quite some time. Should developers even bother with writing code with R5 and/or Zeta in mind? Vote on the poll at the right and let's see who runs what. Maybe that will give a better answer than my own musings. :)

Taking Some Time Off

In case you hadn't noticed, there hasn't been any news out of the ol' DW skunkworks. I haven't really had the desire to do much of anything with BeOS or Haiku the last couple of months, but, frankly, I'm not sure why. Some of it just seems absolutely futile--a chasing after the wind, to quote the book of Ecclesiastes. The thought of writing code almost leaves a bad taste in my mouth... that so much time and thought is poured into something which works well for a time, but also requires maintenance to keep running properly: a total lack of desire or motivation.

I've been here before. The last time I felt this way, it was burnout. There is a distinct possibility that this is the case again, but it feels different this time even though I can't quite put my finger on it.To put it succinctly, I'm puzzled. This may be just a pause in the journey, but only time will tell.

Thought for the day: when you're at the bottom of a well, don't forget to look up. :-)