Friday 7 September 2012

D

I've started reading up on the D programming language. (The book I'm reading is called "The D Programming Language" - รก la C - and I'd recommend it, if only for the humorous style.) And I have to say it's very cool. Whenever I've used C++ in the past, I've thought of ways it could be better, more useful. There are probably posts in this blog about it in fact. Well D is basically C++, but with all the things that it should have had from the start. I'd like to talk about all the features but you might as well read about them yourself. When I find an interesting way of using one I'll probably post about it here.

Wednesday 5 September 2012

Where am I now?

It's been over two years since I've written here, but I think I shall start again. I didn't really add anything, that I remember, to pdEngine since the last post, and there's not much that I'd like to add. It was a fun experience to write, but looking back it's an inefficient mess.
Since then I haven't had any major programming projects. I contributed a few lines of code to an indie game or two, I hacked some features into some audio software for my band and I wrote the odd little program to test maths theories I've had, but nothing major. In fact, I pretty much forgot any intermediate to advanced C++ I knew. Reading this blog has taught me things.
In three weeks time I start reading the Mathematics Tripos at the University of Cambridge, probably the hardest undergraduate maths degree in the world. So maybe I won't have time for programming. But then again, I'd like to get into it. There should be lots of people (many of them actually reading computer science, not chickening out like me) who can program, and I might find some guys to do a project with. Or I might start one of my own.
Either way, with that in mind - and the fact that I have a few weeks to spare doing nothing - I've started reading up on programming. I've found textbooks on assembly and algorithms and TCP/IP, and much more importantly, a few on best practices in C++ and in general. This is something I never really learnt, with only limited team experience. We'll see how that goes.