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[Virex]

Aspen uses Fortran for scripting, so I'm not too surprised it pops up in engineering courses now and then.

[Chattox]

Right, I'll start working through that book!

What would be a good first project to aim towards and give me some motivation?

[MorleyDev]

What would be a good first project to aim towards and give me some motivation?

Well for console window programs a Text Adventure is always good fun. For graphics, the classics like Pong, Space Invaders, Breakout are good starting points ^^

Aspen uses Fortran for scripting, so I'm not too surprised it pops up in engineering courses now and then.

Fortran is often used for high-performance mathematics and for the code for pic chips and the like, so for engineering it's rather useful to know. It also gets a lot of use for physics simulations ran on super computers. For number crunching it is a rather good language.

[Chattox]

Well for console window programs a Text Adventure is always good fun. For graphics, the classics like Pong, Space Invaders, Breakout are good starting points ^^

Hmm, a text adventure you say.. Well, I know this book covered random generation to a small extent, I might be able to make at least a slightly randomly generated text game, that would be cool! I'm very very heavily into randomly generated content in gaming.

[MagmaMcFry]

Awesome, a new programmer. Can't have enough of those.

I don't want to brag, but I can program in LOTS of programming languages (not counting all these weird but awesome ones on http://www.esolangs.org/), and C++ is by far my favourite, good choice. It can be a bit tedious to write some complex games from rock bottom, but almost everything you write in C++ is reusable, so you only have to write that boring low-level stuff once.

Warning: Never ever use an advanced programming environment to learn programming (it will only frustrate you), just use some simple text editors, preferably with syntax highlighting.

If you want some projects to aim towards, I can recommend games, as they come in all stages of difficulty.
I would recommend that you do the following in this order (brackets denote stuff you'll learn):

• Paper Scissors Stone (Basics)
• Tic-Tac-Toe (Loops)
• Four-in-a-Row (Graphics)
• Maze game (Random Generation)
• Chess board (Objects, sprites)
• Battleships (AI)
• Breakout (Physics, advanced input handling)
• Roguelike (Advanced class system, external data)
• Platformer (State system, entities, collisions)
• Racing game (3D graphics, multiplayer support)
• 
• Dwarf Fortress (optional)

Have lots of fun.

Spoiler: Rant (click to show/hide)

In school we are currently supposed to get taught Pascal (FreePascal with the Lazarus GUI development environment), and every program we program is therefore an application.
First problem: We use Pascal. Pascal is like the ugliest and worst programming language ever. The language is case-insensitive, variable declaration and usage have to be separated by miles of code, program flow control is absolute crap, blocks are enclosed in text and not in brackets, and you can't break out of a block or loop.

Second problem: We use Lazarus. As every program we write is an application, three quarters of the time spent programming is spent defining the program's user interface. The user interface creation interface sucks, the provided widgets are crap. The documentation is generally non-existent. The automatic code generation is buggy. And every time you compile, you have to wait one extra minute because of the automatically generated code in all the automatically generated files, which don't actually have to be compiled again every time, but are.

Third problem: Our teacher generally doesn't believe that we have learnt anything unless we use it in at least 5 different programs, each of which takes an hour to program (see Second Problem). Also, he thinks Pascal is great, because it is the only language he was taught.

The result: My class has had over a year of programming now. Our programs have on average 15 non-generated lines of code. Last week we learned how to use the FOR loop.

Edit: Double-ninja'd.

[Chattox]

Also, he thinks Pascal is great, because it is the only language he was taught.

Oh god, I know that feel, man. The last teacher I had was practically Amish in his fervent denying of all advances in programming beyond the 1980s. Very hard to get along with.

Thank you for your input, though. I'm going for C++, as I already feel semi-comfortable with it, having learned a tiny bit of it in the past. I will most certainly be taking in your suggestions of projects, too. Particularly the maze one, I have a couple of ideas for that just looking at it.
Out of interest, which library do you yourself use for graphics?

[Reiina]

Third problem: Our teacher generally doesn't believe that we have learnt anything unless we use it in at least 5 different programs, each of which takes an hour to program (see Second Problem). Also, he thinks Pascal is great, because it is the only language he was taught.

Lol I had a math teacher in middle school that was a pascal fanatic too. A friend and I already knew how to code in assembly/C++(though I'm sure I would cringe if I had still the source codes from back then :p) and spent our times trying to convince him of the superiority of C++ and he would have none of it :p.

[kaijyuu]

Re: What to work on for your project.


No matter what it is, make sure you have actual interest in it. Nothing's a bigger motivational killer than working on something you don't care about. If you've no interest in breakout or tetris, don't make a clone of those.

[Chattox]

I have Visual Studio 2010 Pro (legitimately free from Dreamspark, if you're a uni/college student check it out.) and it's not recognising "cin" or "cout". It says they're "undefined identifiers". I've included iostream, which is all it takes to work in Dev-C++, so what gives?

[Max White]

Are you sure you are working in c++?

[Virex]

* I adore SNUSP despite never having any cause or desire to do any work with it. Even Brainfuck is more useful, but SNUSP is simply beautiful. From the link, this is a multiplication function;

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

     read two characters    ,>,==\  *    /=================== ATOI   ----------\
     convert to integers /=/@</@=/  *   // /===== ITOA  ++++++++++\ /----------/
                multiply @ \=!\=========/ //           /++++++++++/ \----------\
            convert back !/@!\============/            \++++++++++\ /----------/
    and print the result \/  \.#    *                  /++++++++++/ \--------#
    /====================/          *                  \++++++++#
    |
    |    /-<+>\                    #/?=<<<<\!>>>>\                   />>+<+<-\
    |   #\?===/! BMOV1 =====\       \->>>>+/    //  /======== BSPL2 !\======?/#
    |    /->+<\         /===|=========== FMOV4 =/  //                /<<+>+>-\
    |   #\?===/! FMOV1 =|===|==============\  /====/  /====== FSPL2 !\======?/#
    |                /==|===|==============|==|=======/
    |           * * *|* | * | * * * * * * *|* | * * *                /+<-\
    |           * />@/<@/>>@/>>===\ /====>>\@<\@<\  *   /==== ADD2  !\>=?/<#
    \===== MUL2 =?/>@\==<#<<<==\  \!\<<<<@\>>>>-?/\ *  //            /-\
                *    \\        \/@========|======</ * //  /== ZERO  !\?/#
                * * * \\* * * * | * * * * | * * * * *//  //
                       \\       |         \==========/  //
                        \======!\=======================/

I think this is why I actually enjoyed using LabView, where a simple program/Virtual Instrument looks like this;

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That's a simple string synthesiser, using a pitch corrected Karplus-Strong algorithm, bundled into a single VI that can then be dropped into later programs as a single icon. Hence the output waveform being passed as data rather than to an audio output node. The program mostly follows this tutorial and sounds pretty much the same.

If you aren't careful then you can quickly end up with stuff like this. Although you need to get into the comments to see TRWTF. And even then I've seen considerably scarier programs produced by undergrads with no programming training; think no iteration (For/While loops) and everything done with nested sequence and case structures. I couldn't have gotten a screenshot if I wanted to. And that controlled a high voltage electromagnet. My debugging attempt lasted all of four minutes, ending with me demonstrating various loops, how to make SubVIs and showing him the extremely highly recommended standard that any one VI should fit on one screen.

Oh, and that's the 'language' under the control software for a goodly number of particle accelerators. Including the LHC.

Damn you, I was planning to do something productive today and instead I wrote a fucking SNUSP interpreter...


Also, holy hell I either made a mistake somewhere or that multiplier is slow as dropping tar. Are < and > used for single steps or to change the direction of movement? Because if I made a mistake their I may've ended up in an infinite loop. I would try to figure out what the Perl implementation here does, but I can't read that for the life of me (to much punctiation, and that comes from someone who just wrote an interpreter in Lisp )

[kaijyuu]

Don't you need "using namespace std" for cin and cout to work as well?

[Chattox]

Are you sure you are working in c++?

Derp, it's in Visual C++. I'm guessing that doesn't really deal with console stuff? If VS2010 isn't good for console apps, what's a good IDE/compiler that is relatively up to date? All I have at the moment is Dev-C++ and Code::Blocks which wont even load for some reason.

[Max White]

Are you sure your output type is a console application?
There is a process here to follow you know.

[Chattox]

DERP. I completely forgot to put in "using namespace std;", totally slipped my mind.

Forgot to take off my +1 raiment of retardedness.