Adventures in Programming

So, recently I've become very interested in programming. There's a few things that I am really excited about learning and other things that are super boring.  I will try to skip most of the boring stuff and move onto the other stuff.

To start, I studied programming in high school briefly. A little QBasic and a dabble of... I forget. That was a life time ago and honestly I didn't learn enough to do more than pass the class and forget everything.

After high school, I tried making websites with a friend of mine.  They were terrible.  I was just learning HTML and JavaScript was just starting to be a thing. I still had a Hotmail account and Trillian (aim/yahoo/irc) were both my main source of communication.  I burned out quickly on HTML because websites didn't interest me at all.  I was more interested in performing which is what I did for the better part of a decade.

Fast Forward.  I learned Microsoft Office for business and threw all of myself into Pharmacy.  I love Pharmacy but I feel like I could be bettering myself in the down times.  So I started learning to program.

Ruby/Ruby On Rails

First, I started playing with Ruby. I don't remember how I got into Ruby but I'm sure I read some blog post about how it's easy to learn.  Ruby is an interesting language to be sure. I like many things about it.  For one, the language format (syntax) is pretty straight forward.  At least I thought at the time.

Then I looked at what Ruby does.  This is important for anyone wanting to learn.  It has a ton of strengths: great community, lots of gems (libraries), and so on. When I looked at applications, there's games, desktop applications, websites back end handling... But when it comes down to it, really the website thing is about the only thing I found where Ruby regularly shined.  Add to that, I just didn't feel 100% comfortable with it.

Java/JavaScript

Next we have Java/JavaScript. I started doing lessons in SoloLearn.  I got a third of the way through and I was like... this isn't for me. That's as far as I got.  Nothing bad to say about it.  It just wasn't a good fit for me.  I was hoping to make mods in minecraft but I learned that Java/JavaScript are two very different things but I had no idea how to tell the difference between the two.  If Java is anything like JS, it really wasn't my thing.

C++

I discovered C++ and honestly, I really like C++.  There's a great community and the syntax makes a lot of sense to me.  I also like how fast C++ is.  I saw a game someone made from scratch in C++ and the top comment was "Oh, C++? That means it'll run optimized on even a toaster."  I don't know why I remember that.

Working through C++, I was finding that to do anything was a fairly large undertaking.  From scratch anyways.  There are a ton of libraries you can use.  That's awesome but I wanted to learn more nuts and bolts.

Python

Finally, I gave in and picked up Python.  One of the projects I struggled with for about a week in C++, took me literally 2 hours in Python.  Python has a ton of strengths over C++.  I like the feel of python, and I like a lot of what python does.

Honorable Mentions

C#, PHP, Swift, HTML, SQL, CSS - all of these course popped up in my Unity ads as well as independent learning sites I frequent. 

Looking over them, I didn't really feel them...  I know that's a weird analysis but I just didn't have interest in them.  Well, except SQL but I will save that for later. 

Adventures in Programing part 2: Game Development

3rd Party Programs

I dabbled in some 3rd party programs with proprietary languages and scripting.

Godot: I like godot and the scripting language they use is very similar to python
                       Well Known Games:  None that I know of... Deep Sixed maybe?

GameMaker Studio 2: GMS is to game development what Dreamweaver was to websites.  It's not terrible but it's not great. 
                       Well Known Games:UnderTale, Forager, Hotline Miami (before it's language switch)



Final Choice

In the end, I realized that I am not regulated to just one language or program. I feel the focus of my programming will be C++ and python.  They both suit my needs for wildly different reasons.  For the purposes of this blog, my time investment and what I plan on learning: the focus of this blog will be most my adventures in C++/.