Introduction

My name is Chris, and this is my programming blog. I run one other blog here, which is a personal one.

I have been a programmer for two years. One year in high school, where I studied Java, and another year in college, where I studied C++. In High School, learning programming sucked. While I have always been a very careful speaker, programming languages demand a level of rigidity in expression that is not found in the modern languages we speak today. Getting used to the rigid syntax was the biggest hurdle I had faced, but once I got over it everything got easier.

In college, I learned C++. The first semester of college was boring because the syntax, while similar in most cases to Java, requires a different method of thinking but offers several advantages that Java does not. It is these advantages that allow me to express myself simpler than Java could, and I eventually saw the raw power of expression that C++ has that Java does not and fell in love with the language.

This is not to say that Java is not beneficial. Arguably, it can be easier to learn, and use. Perhaps the reason it's more widely used is because it's safer. While abstracting pointer manipulation out of the hands of the user takes away a lot of power, the security in not possibly accessing data that the program is not supposed to (and either crashing, or altering something important, or reading in garbage, or any other problem that illegally accessing a memory address can lead to) can be quite an advantage to business applications that must run stably.

My first semester of college was boring. I had been through java, and was essentally learning to do in C++ what I already knew how to do in Java. I passed with an A. The final exam was 2 or 3 free-response questions on a fresh mind with 2 hours to think. The final exam in High School was 4 free-response questions with an hour to think on a mind that just finished churning over 45 multiple choice questions, and the AP multiple choice questions are not easy.

My second semester of college saw me learning new things, starting from the simple and moving on to to a level of complexity that was too much for my mind to process, and so I took a break to wonder if this is what I really want to do in life.

I didn't look at code for about three months after college got out, and when I looked at some, in boredom, the sudden mental stimulation that I realized I was missing made me depressed, and I vowed to get back into the game, and that is what this blog is all about.